To He Who Overcomes

Do you know that you were created for royalty? Do you know that the woman on that porn site, the one you are lusting after, the one trapped and coerced and abused into unspeakable acts of degrading, dignity destroying, darkness and despair was created for royalty too? Do you know that Jesus Christ died for you, for me, and for her, and that he rose victorious from the dead on the third day, defeating sin and death and restoring our access to a relationship with God the Father? Do you know that Jesus want’s to restore your true manhood, her true womanhood, restore you both to a life of honesty, nobility and integrity, and elevate you and that poor woman on your screen to the royal status we were intended for? Has it ever crossed your mind that she was made in God’s image just like you were and that she is intended to reign with Christ as a Queen of the new creation?

Jesus was successful in his Mission and that is something to praise God Almighty for! He completed his calling and followed his Father’s will and was obedient even to death on a cross (Phil 2:8) and because of this, God the Father has glorified his Son Jesus! Jesus has overcome and has been given incredible rewards from his Father beyond our comprehension. He will reign as High King of the new heaven and the new earth for all eternity. Riches, glory, honor, and power are all due his name because he will be found worthy as the “Lion of the tribe of Judah” and “the Root of David” to open the scroll (Rev 5:5). Do you know that if you put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ that you will be adopted into the family of God, called a child of the most high God and that as a child of God you will co-inherit Jesus’ reward in the new creation (Rom 8: 16-17)? When he comes, which only the Father knows the day or the hour when Jesus will return, Jesus will gather his Church (The Bride of Christ) together and we will all partake in a massive ceremony: the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19: 6-9). We will be crowned Kings and Queens of the new creation and will be appointed to reign as joint heirs with Christ over that new creation forever and ever.

In his book “The Death of Porn” Pastor Ray Ortlund expounds on this truth for the first 3 chapters. When I say that this book changed my life, I mean to my very core. I’m a firm believer that the Holy Spirit works through others and their experiences and wisdom to write books that can touch us very deeply. The Spirit seems to constantly lead me to just the right book at the right moment for what I’m going through or the area in which I’m currently experiencing growth. Reading “The Death of Porn”, as hard as it was to accept the reality of what Pastor Ortlund was writing and to stair my sin in it’s ugly face, I felt loved by Jesus through this book like I never had before. It opened my eyes to my royalty in Christ. Pastor Ortlund’s words of wisdom through 6 letters written from an older man to a younger man touched my soul on a different level and truly opened my eyes for the first time to the horrors of Porn and worse, the horrors of the reality of my involvement in using Porn. I had already been following Jesus for about a year when this book was recommended to me by my Brother-In-Law. I had overcome alcohol use (honestly not on my own though, Jesus just took away my desire for alcohol instantly the moment I surrendered my heart to the Lord and I haven’t had a drink in over 4 years -Praise God!) but I was still struggling with using porn. I had stopped looking so often and had surrendered my will to God’s but “old habits die hard” as they say and I was still secretly looking at porn maybe every other month or so for another year after I came to Christ. I tried for a little while to figure this out on my own but it wasn’t until my pride was absolutely crushed while reading “The Death or Porn” that I cried out to Jesus and asked the Holy Spirit for real change in my heart. You see, porn use is an outward expression of an inward problem. My problem was not my porn use, that was surface level. My problem was that I loved my sin in my heart more than God. I needed a heart surgeon! I didn’t want to desire porn any more. I didn’t want to use it anymore. I didn’t want it in my life anymore. I didn’t want to think about it anymore or dream about it anymore. I wanted nothing to do with it, period. I gave it up to the Lord and Praise God, I’ve been sober of Porn use for 3+ years now. By coming to an understanding of our current and future royalty in Jesus, Pastor Ray gently helped me see the truth as hard as it may be to say: for 15 years I was siding with Satan against God and against woman. Satan hates woman. He loves blind oblivious men. He loves when we blindly seek after sexual gratification through the abuse, rape, and trafficking of woman likely without even knowing it (if you don’t believe that these things go on behind the scenes or if you believe that the woman you are masturbating to is having a “good time” or “enjoying” it, I beg you my friend, please wake up, come to Jesus, seek the truth and you will find it). He loves keeping us in that bondage – in that low place of degraded manhood.

Can you face a couple hard truths with me: porn is fake sex – porn is evil – porn is of utter darkness – it is not of the light (1 John 1: 5-10). Porn is a worthless shadow of the true plans God has for you and your sexuality. Any sexual climax you’ve ever had by looking at porn and masturbating can never even compare to the truth of the design God has for our lives: it’s called marriage. The bible is clear, God created us in his image, he created human’s as only two genders, male and female (Gen 1: 26-28) and within his design for marriage we clearly see one man and one woman joined together as one flesh, permanent and exclusive till death do us part (Gen 2: 24-25). All other sexual activity outside of marriage is sinful, period. Hebrews 13:4 cannot be clearer on God’s design for marriage as the only place to experience true sex as God intended it “Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled; but fornicators and adulterers God will judge”. I love the chapter in “The Death of Porn” where Pastor Ortlund doesn’t shy away from elaborating on how fake porn is and how every time we look at porn what we are truly looking for is Jesus! I highly recommend you read “The Death of Porn”.

If you are a young single man struggling with lust and porn, come to Jesus, surrender to him, ask him to fill you with the Holy Spirit, and start praying for a wife! Not the wife you think you want or worse, deserve, with the right looks, shape, size, interests, etc. etc. etc. but begin praying earnestly for the wife God has prepared for you from the foundations of the earth – ask, aligning with God’s will, and you will receive (Luke 9: 9-10). Within that marriage you can experience true sex with the partner God intended for you – nothing can ever compare with that! However, don’t expect the temptations to stop just because you get married. I’ve spoken to many men over the past few years of all ages (some in their 80s!) and if you are a man, here is the next fact to face: we will struggle with temptation in the area of lust for the rest of our lives until Jesus glorifies us in Heaven. However, the Apostle Paul is clear in his letter to the Corinthian Church “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 ^[a]bear it.” (1 Cor 10:13). Did you catch that? God himself will make the “way of escape” for you – pray and ask him to reveal it to you, I’m confident he will – but it will be up to you to take the way of escape time after time, day after day, year after year but don’t worry, God himself will be there to help you every step of the way through the power of his Holy Spirit, simply yield your desires to him every single day – if you go one day without porn, praise him, give him glory and tell him “Lord you helped me today, please help me tomorrow, I need you every day, I cannot win this fight on my own, I surrender to you, please change my heart from the inside out” – as you overcome porn one day at a time, continue to come to him, continue to give him the glory and never worry “God is Faithful” he will always be there to help you when you call upon his name (Jer 29: 11-13)

If you are a married man struggling with lust or porn use, I beg of you to do the same! Come to Jesus, surrender to him, ask daily for the power of the Holy Spirit and begin seeing your wife in an entirely new way: as the God given gift she is! As the woman God prepared for you before time began and as the Queen of the new creation she is intended to be. Radiant, valiant, beautiful inside and out exactly as God made her. He made her for you, and you for her. Her sexuality for you and yours for her. Permanent and exclusive. We must stop being selfish. We must cry out to the Lord in true repentance and begin putting our spouse before our selves. In marriage we are servants of each other, we are not in it for our own gain. Marriage is a picture of Christ’s love for the Church and Paul summed up our role as Husbands with this impossible task: Eph 5:25 “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the Church and gave himself for her.” Although we may fail at this task, let it be our goal as Husbands to strive to be more Christ like daily towards our wives (if you are single, how are you relating to the single woman in your life? This verse is for you too, are you treating the women in your life as if they could be your future wife? Are you loving them as God’s daughters and/or sisters in Christ the same way Jesus loves his Church?) – one day at a time, one step at a time. God has allowed us the privilege to show our wives how much Christ loves them, through our words, our actions, our denying of ourselves and putting them and their needs before our own. Let’s treat them like the queens they are! Protecting them, defending them, providing not only for their physical needs but also for their emotional needs, being available to them emotionally and honestly speaking about our struggles with lust and porn. Being honest is the only way to rebuild trust. By being patient with them. They’ve been hurt by your porn use and often times they need space and time and pray to heal. My wife and I, by the grace of God and by alot of time, prayer, couples counseling and by showing up every day to do the work required, have reconciled and have grown closer than ever, all by God’s transforming grace and it started with me, in the name of Jesus, casting out the demon of porn use in my life. Let us pray that God fills us with the Holy Spirit every day, that we deny our own selfish desires, that we guard our hearts and our minds by being conscious of what we put in front of our eyes and what we allow in our homes, and let us show our love for Jesus to our wives, our sisters, our mothers, or family, our friends, and to the world by casting away the evil of porn.

I have always loved C. S. Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia”. As a teen I used to have a tradition where every Christmas Eve I would stay up the entire night and starting with “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe” I would read the Chronicles of Narnia books straight through and see how far I could get. I think the best I did was through the first 4 books and into The 5th Book (speaking in the order they were published) and I ended up somewhere in “The Horse and His Boy” before Christmas morning rolled around! Throughout all the times I read those books, I knew there was some correlation between the narrative and the truths found in God’s word. The honest truth is though, I had no idea how much of the bible there is in the Chronicles of Narnia! In particular, I had never given much thought to the ending of “The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe” until after I came to Jesus. With help from Pastor Ray Ortlund and “The Death of Porn”, I finally understood the full picture because I finally understood that I was created for royalty. That I was ripped away from that purpose when I had sinned and fallen from God’s grace, but that God had restored me to that royal status through the finished work of Jesus on the cross and that one day, I will be crowned a King of the new creation and reign with Christ forever and ever (Rev 22:4). The picture we see in”The Lion The Witch, and The Wardrobe” is this: The main characters, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy overcome great odds and opposition by defeating the evil White Witch who had taken over Narnia and enslaved it’s citizens in a never ending Winter. The great lion Aslan (the Christ figure) had sacrificed himself in place of Edmund on the stone table. The White Witch thought she had victory, but Aslan new the deeper magic. The stone table cracked and the spell and power of the White Witch over the land was broken. After defeating the White Witch and her army in a final battle, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy are crowned Kings and Queens of Narnia where they rule with kindness and love and peace and justice over the citizens of Narnia. As you read the scene from the book below, put yourself in the story. See yourself there as Peter or Susan or Edmund or Lucy, imagine for a minute the truth that comes into this story from God’s word, the truth of God’s love for you and the lengths he was willing to go to save you and how Jesus is in Heaven right now, waiting for the day when he can crown you! As you read it, imagine for a minute that all the women you’ve ever lusted after on porn sites have the same royal destiny! If you and they put your faith and trust in Jesus, turn from your sin to God and ask him for his forgiveness, no matter what you’ve done, said, thought, no matter the sins of your past, present, and future, Jesus sacrificed himself for them on the cross and the power of sin and death was broken, once and for all! If you follow Jesus, he will help you every day by the power of his Spirit, and you will be crowned a King or Queen of the new creation and you will reign with Christ forever and ever!

‘For then, in the Great Hall of Cair Paravel – that wonderful hall with ivory roof and the west wall hung with peacock’s feathers and the eastern door which looks towards the sea, in the presence of all their friends and to the sound of trumpets, Alsan solemnly crowned them and led them to the four thrones amid deafening shouts of, “Long Live King Peter, Long Live Queen Susan, Long Live King Edmund, Long Live Queen Lucy!” – “Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia. Bear it well, Sons of Adam! Bear it Well, Daughters of Eve!” said Aslan. And through the eastern door, which was wide open, came the voices of the mermen and the mermaids swimming close to the shore and singing in honor of the new Kings and Queens. So the Children sat on their thrones and scepters were put in their hands and they gave rewards and honors to all their friends, to Tumnus the Faun, and to the Beavers, and Giant Rumble-Buffin, to the Leopards, and the good centaurs, and the good dwarfs, and to the lion. And that night there was a great feast in Cair Paravel, and revelry and dancing, and gold flashed and wine flowed, and answering to the music inside, but stranger, sweeter, and more piercing, came the music of the sea people.’

-In Christ, Ryan.

“To He who overcomes I will grant to sit with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His Throne” – Jesus Christ (Rev 3:21)