The Steve Nam Podcast

All right, so let's talk about the lies that you believe about porn that are keeping you stuck. The first one is that you feel like you need porn or you feel like you need to masturbate so that you can have a sexual release. You might feel like you can't live without porn, that what happens if I don't go without masturbating? I might explode, I might die, right? I might, something might go really wrong in my life and if I don't get this hit, if I don't get this thing that gives me balance in my life, I might go crazy, right? And the truth is though that no one actually needs it.

Again, I know it sounds like weird, like what are you talking about, Steve? I can't do this, okay? But it's not a requirement. You don't need porn to learn about sex. You don't need porn to keep your relationship exciting.

You don't need to watch porn so that you make sure you're not missing out on the best sexual experiences in life, okay? What's actually happening here is that you've become addicted to the dopamine rush that you get from watching porn and so your brain gets this payoff and it starts craving this because it is so hooked and so your brain starts telling you all kinds of weird things to make sure that it's getting what it wants, all right? So this is why quitting porn can become really so challenging and what you're gonna learn when you start operating a different way is that your emotion, your spiritual well-being, your brain chemistry have really all been impacted and influenced and changed by porn. And so right now, yes, you may be chemically dependent on it and so partially that's why at some level you're operating under this lie, these lies that your brain is telling you and you're like, okay, well, if I don't believe this lie, you're telling me it's a lie but I think it's truth, what am I supposed to believe? Because if you're telling me that I can live without porn, well, how am I supposed to go about doing that, right? The truth is that you can live without porn but what you need to do is you need to start on the journey of becoming free before you can actually feel and understand the truth that you can be without porn, all right? You're gonna realize that you don't actually need it, you don't need to masturbate and that is the truth. For now, what you need to do is you need to know that truth, maybe be open-minded to accepting something different that you can maybe start operating under a different assumption, you can realize that you don't need to release your sexual energy in these ways, using these vehicles and be open to a new possibility for your life that maybe my life could be different if I gave up porn, if I gave up masturbating, if I started living without this sexual sin in my life, all right? The second lie about porn that might be keeping you stuck right now is that you might feel that you are beyond the point of change, all right? Listen, if you have ever felt defeated or hopeless that maybe what if I can never become free from porn, all right, I'm with you, I've also been there countless times after watching porn and failing over and over and over again and just thinking like, when am I ever gonna get free of this? It messes with you, it does and it tells you that, hey, look, maybe you're damaged goods, maybe you've messed up too much, maybe you'll always be stuck in this.

You start telling yourself that, you know, maybe I've gotten so far deep in this addiction and now I'm past the point of change, I'm past where I thought I'd ever be and every time I told myself I would stop, I just kept going more and more and what I want you to know right now is I've been there and I want you to know that you can change, that change is possible but first it starts with dropping this lie from your thinking and then opening yourself up to a new possibility that look, friend, you are never beyond the point of God's love for you and you are never beyond the point where God's power can rescue you, can save you and that is not just a possibility, that's the truth, that's not just maybe that's true, no, that's true but you have to open yourself up to that, you have to allow yourself to accept that truth, you have to decide that yeah, it's time for a change, it's time for me to accept that this is not just a possibility but a truth that I'm gonna internalize and then allow it to change my life and radically maybe it's gonna take a big change for me but I'm not gonna do it on my own anymore, I'm gonna invite God in, I'm gonna come out of hiding, I'm gonna stop keeping my hang up and this sexual sin a secret and I'm gonna connect with other people who have become free, I'm gonna start believing the truth that God is with me, that I can never escape, I can never run too far from his hand over my life and I'm gonna allow him to change me from the inside out and so once you realize that yes, okay, I don't need porn and secondly, I'm not beyond the point of change, the third thing that you want to get rid of your life, the lie that you might be believing that is keeping you stuck and keeping you feeling like you can't change is that I'm all alone in my battle with porn addiction, okay? It might feel like no one else has the same problem or that no one else can understand this struggle and they don't understand the depths of porn that you've experienced but that's just simply not true, okay? If you are stuck alone in an addiction and you are hiding it from everyone else right now, yes, you have imprisoned yourself, you've built walls around you and you've put yourself in isolation and it's causing you to think right now that no one else would understand your situation and that if you ever let someone in or if you ever got out of these walls and showed yourself, revealed who you really are, that people would never accept you, that they would reject you if they knew the truth of what you've done, what you've seen, what you've let yourself get stuck. They'd think less of you, your pride, your ego, all of it would take a huge hit and maybe you could never show your face again, maybe that would be the death, the end of you and what I want to tell you is that number one, brother, I'm with you. Number two, God is with you and you can never escape God's love.

You can never need to feel alone because God says that he'll never leave you forsaken. He's for you and not against you and if you can internalize that and allow yourself to see yourself in the light of how God sees you, you'll number one, know that you're never alone but also that there's other people just like me who have been freed of porn, who has been in porn and been stuck in porn and has found a way out and brother, we would accept you with open arms and we would say, look man, I've been there before, I know how hard it is and you're not alone. There's countless other guys.

I mean, there's so much of our population, if you want to talk about it in a macro sense, that is stuck in the sin of porn and whether they think of it as a sin or not, they're stuck in this habit, they're stuck in this hang up and they know that they want to get better, they know that they don't want to feel dependent on this and so you're not alone in that, all right? You've built this wall and you're not letting anyone in and that's exactly what the enemy wants for your life. He wants you to keep it hidden. He wants you to feel alone.

He wants you to remain afraid and stuck in your chains so that you keep doing it alone, okay? And you say, okay, this is who I am in public but in private, that's just for me. That's just something that I'm just gonna have to wrestle with alone and if I can't bring this to the light because if I do, people are just gonna reject me. They're gonna throw me away.

They're gonna realize that I'm damaged goods and that I don't deserve anything good in my life because I've done something so bad and so if you feel like that, I wanna tell you, friend, you are not alone. You are not the only one who deals with sex addiction and I know I'm trying to remind you of that right now but I do believe that deep down, you know that. We've all got our own issues.

We've all got different experiences, different traumatic experiences, whether porn has traumatized you, whether you've had a sexual trauma in the past. What you're gonna find is that when you bring your sin to the light and you relate to other believers who have been there as well, you're gonna find acceptance. When you share your experience and you hear the experiences of others, when you open up and actually allow yourself to connect with somebody else, you're gonna discover that there are more people, many people than you would have ever imagined that are in the same boat as you and the core issues that drive your addiction to porn are actually really all pretty much the same.

The things that we experience at a heart level that makes us act out, you're gonna start to realize, hey, I'm not the only one who deals with this stuff or deals with these desires or deals with these temptations, right? And once you bring your sin into the light, the darkness, the temptations, the power that this addiction has over you, it starts to loosen, it starts to get weaker, it starts to break, right? But it's not just about connecting on the struggling part. The important thing is that you have to learn that there's a way out, right? So I think that's a first step, bringing your sin to the light. And it's not just about, hey, getting with another brother and going, dude, hey, do you watch porn? Yeah, I do too.

And like, okay, that's great, like now you know that you're not alone, but it's not just about knowing that other people are out there struggling with this, but it's about you getting into freedom. It's about you getting free, finding freedom in Christ so that you can go and save and rescue your other brothers who are stuck as well, right? And whether you're pointing them to freedom from porn or whether you're calling them to freedom from something else, you can let them know that freedom can be found in Christ, okay? God offers us the key to a real free life, a life where we don't have to be mastered by our flesh. We don't have to be mastered by the things that once held us in bondage, okay? You don't have to do it alone.

You are not alone. And if you keep yourself stuck and alone and continuing to believe this lie, then you will continue to stay stuck in this sin, okay? Now, the fourth lie that you might be believing is that you have to suppress your desires or you need to pretend that you don't actually have desires, that they're not there, deny them. You know, you may have heard, there's approaches to getting rid of sin where you just deny your feelings at all, that, you know, if I just stuff them down, if I just pretend that they're not there, then maybe that'll get me free from porn, right? I wanna be very clear here.

Suppressing your desires is not the solution, okay? God created you with those desires. And what we wanna do instead is we wanna let God not stuff them down, not throw them away, but instead to change them, to redeem them as a biblical term, to redeem them for his purposes, to take what was once broken and make it new, make it refreshed, you know, heal it, make it used for his purposes, for his glory. And when you understand God's love and when you understand the reasons why you have these desires, how God has actually designed sex and how he's designed it to be fulfilling for us, but in the right context and not to be used and not abused, what you're gonna find is that your desires will shift away from using porn.

You're gonna be able to redeem your desires so that you use them towards what's actually more redeeming, pleases God, what glorifies him, right? And what I wanna remind you, friend, is that God does not want you to suppress your desires. He wants you to actually use them and to transmute that energy, if you will, for his good and for his purpose. And the truth is that if you are trying to ignore or pretend that they're not there so that you can overcome your desires, that's just not how it's gonna work, right? We don't overcome our desires, right? There's no like, I can just one day overcome a desire and then all of a sudden that desire will be hidden underneath and it'll never like rise to the top again, right? Like we need to take those desires and channel them differently so we don't act out in ways that are unhealthy for us, okay? We overcome addiction.

We change our desires and we overcome the addictions. We, yeah, if you wanna throw something away, throw, you know, change the addiction, change the hang up, change the stuff, the actual outcome that where you're acting out, but the desires are something within. The desires can be used so that you produce good fruit and not bad fruit.

Does that make sense? Okay, so what I wanna tell you is that, you know, if you try to suppress your desires, it's not just going to lead you to frustration, it's gonna make you confused. And what you have to realize is that the problem is not that we have sexual energy. We've learned to use or misuse our sexual energy in a way that actually harms us, that doesn't do us any good, that doesn't set us up for our future.

It doesn't, whether it's our current marriage or our future wife, whatever it is, it's not setting us up to be the type of man that we wanna be for a spouse or to show up for our kid in our family, in our church, in our community, what have you, right? The truth is that you can channel your sexual energy productively and you can use it for God's glory, but you've got to learn how to see your sexual desires in a whole new way. And that is the lie that you might be believing right now that's keeping you stuck. I mean, I believe that ever since I was a teenager, I remember thinking that, you know, the biggest lie I ever told myself was that I could never actually be free from porn because at some level, all guys are just dealing with this.

The fifth lie that I believed was that these desires were always gonna be stuck. And I was convinced that, I always said to other guys, actually, I spread this lie and I said, hey, look, if you talk to a group of guys, look, 95 to 99% of them would admit that they watch porn. And then that other 5% or 1%, they're the ones who are lying, okay? Because the truth is in my mind, I convinced myself that all guys just struggle with porn.

I couldn't imagine a world where guys did not struggle with porn, where guys could be free. And so I just believed that the rest of them were lying. I thought that the reason why they would be afraid to is because they would be afraid of fessing up because of how our surveys work, that they just couldn't tell the truth.

And so maybe I should just be like one of those guys. I didn't know a single person who was free. And, you know, if I ever heard about some weirdo online saying that, oh, God's freed me or delivered me and I was just freed in an instant, I really refused to believe it.

And I think it was sometimes those testimonies that I was like, there's no way. Like I never actually heard of someone where God transformed them through a process. And I just, all I had heard of was like instant deliveries and like I prayed and God just removed the desire.

And look, I tried. I tried to pray and have God remove the desire and it did not happen for me. I'm not someone who thinks that that can't happen for somebody, but for me, it didn't happen.

And from what I've observed, what actually happens in the majority of cases of guys who get free of porn, there's a process that they have to go through. It's a character building process. And the reason why we struggle, the reason why we have the good desires and the bad desires is because that friction and that struggle and that fighting and that warring and that combating is how our character is built.

And that's how God perfects us. That's how he shapes us and molds us and makes us more like his son, okay? But what I'm trying to say is that, you know, it just seems so far out of reach. Being free of porn was, it just seems impossible.

How am I ever gonna get free? And it wasn't until I started seeing a lot more accounts of people that were collectively trying to give up porn and then actually looking like, okay, they're successful at it. And I'm reading these success stories of people that are on this process and actually starting to find freedom. And I started looking into it and I opened myself up to a new possibility for myself and realizing that maybe this was a lie I'd been telling myself, that maybe freedom actually was possible.

And ironically, now I'm one of those weirdos online who can say that porn is not my default, right? Porn is not something that is just like a default that I feel like I need to run back to. It's a totally new operating system that I've installed and really I've smoothed out a lot of kinks. A lot of stuff happens for me now more automatically.

Now, of course, I still have a lot of safeguards in place. I'm not foolish in that way, but it took a process for me to get to this point. It took me being open to the possibility that maybe I had it all wrong along, right? So that is the fifth lie that you think that you're just gonna be stuck forever and that there's no way out.

And I'm here to tell you that there is a new possibility for yourself. And the reason why there is is because freedom can be found in Jesus Christ. Jesus came to set you free.

The thief comes to kill, steal and destroy. And Jesus said himself that he came to give life and life to the full, life more abundant. And so that's the good news for today.

Listen, I hope that this training was helpful, was encouraging for you. I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. And I look forward to talking to you in the next video.