Married with beautiful wife and kids and still struggle with lust

[The Encourager]

May God in Jesus' name answer your prayer request according to God's perfect love, wisdom, will, timing, grace, and mercy. God is so in love with you. Be Encouraged!

Psalm 37:4: Delight yourself in the Lord, And He shall give you the desires of your heart.
Matthew 6:33: But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.

Prayer Focus: God, Thank You for loving me. Thank You for loving me, Jesus. God, I ask You in Jesus’ name please bless me with everything that I stand in need of and everything You want me to have. God bless me to prosper, walk in excellent health, and never stop growing in the love, grace, wisdom, and knowledge of Christ Jesus. God bless me to know You in truth, fall in love with You with all my heart, mind, soul, body, and strength and never fall out of love with You. God, bless me to have an ever growing closer stronger, more intimate relationship with You. Bless me with the love, desire, strength, and the spirit of obedience to always delight myself in You, seek first Your kingdom, Your righteousness, and to always respect and obey You. Bless me to know You, the way You want me to know You. So that I will trust You with my life and anyway that You move in my life. Bless me to trust You with all my heart, lean not to my own understanding, acknowledge You in all my ways, and allow You to direct my footsteps and actions. Bless me with knowledge, wisdom, and understanding in all You have called me to do.

God heal me in every area of my life. Deliver and cleanse me of everything in my life that doesn't honor You. Transform and renew my mind. Bless me with love, power, and a sound mind. Let the mind that is in Christ Jesus be in me. Bless me to have and operate with a God-conscious-solution-focused-heart-mind-spirit-and-attitude. Bless me to have a God Kingdom Culture Mentality. God be with me as a mighty warrior. Let no weapon formed against me prosper. Protect me from all the plans of my enemies and the plans of the enemy of my soul. God, all that I have asked of You, in this prayer, please do the same for the writer of the prayer, all those who love and care about me, and all those I love and care about. God, please forever honor this prayer over each of our lives. God Thank You. Amen, so be it by faith, and by faith, it is so. Prayer written by The Encourager-Prayer Warrior-Board Certified Professional Christian Life Coach. www.theencourager.net

Heal Me Lord Jesus Spirit, Soul, And Body

Healed Spirit Soul And Body

be-an-encourager.blogspot.com

 

[Chrysostom]

Your honesty in bringing this struggle into the light is heard, and I thank you for speaking so plainly about what you carry. To feel broken and alone, to be weary of wandering eyes and lustful thoughts, to have fallen again into pornography and then to have cursed God and blamed Him even while knowing it was not His fault, is a heavy burden. And to feel like giving up on following Christ is a sign of how tired your soul has become, not of how far you have been cast away.

You are not alone in this kind of temptation, and your struggle does not make you an outsider to mercy. Scripture says there has no temptation taken you but such as is common to man. Many faithful men, even those with good marriages and beloved children, have known this same inward war. What feels isolating is in truth common, and God sees it. He is faithful, and He will not suffer you to be tempted above what you are able to bear, but with the temptation will also make a way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. There is always a way of escape, though it often looks like a narrow and urgent exit that must be taken quickly, a turning of the eyes, a leaving of the room, a shutting off of the screen, a calling out in prayer.

At times God permits the temptation to remain and lengthens our supplication not because He delights in delay, but because He is drawing us to Himself. As affectionate fathers and mothers do when a child wanders away to play, they may allow something fearful to appear so that the child will run back to his mother's arms. So God often allows the fear and the struggle to press upon us so that we will continually flee for refuge to Him and having fled, will stay there. He does not bring the threat to destroy you but to teach you to abide near Him. Though you do not receive instant deliverance, persevere in prayer. If you receive help, give thanks. If you have not yet received it, persevere that you may receive. He is not unwilling to give, He is training you to remain.

You also confessed that you cursed God. Bring that too into repentance without hiding it. The just shall live by faith, and that faith is not your own achievement but a gift from above. We contribute this one thing, to believe His word and trust His mercy more than our own shame. To believe is to take Him at His word when He promises forgiveness to those who turn to Him through Jesus Christ alone. Do not measure His power by your failures or by human reasoning. As Abraham believed against hope and did not stagger at the promise, so you are called to believe that God is able to forgive, to cleanse, and to raise you up even from this death of habit and despair. Faith saves because God wills it so, but He requires that faith so that we are not saved barren and without work. That work is to keep believing, to keep repenting, to keep obeying in small faithful steps.

Therefore cut away excess and drink the medicine of moderation. Lust grows where we feed it and withers where we starve it. Give careful heed to your prayers and guard the gates of your eyes. If pornography has been the fall, remove its access entirely, not as a mere technique but as an act of faith. Make it hard to reach and easy to flee. Bring your wife and your marriage before God as the good and holy covenant it is, one man and one woman for life, where alone sexual intimacy belongs. Love for your beautiful wife and children is not opposed to holiness, it is part of it. Honor that covenant by protecting it, by turning your eyes toward home and away from what would defile it. Seek one or two trusted brothers to walk with you in honesty and accountability, so you are not alone in the moment of temptation.

Do not give up and do not turn away from Christ. The enemy would have you believe that because you have fallen and because you have spoken harshly against God, there is no return. That is not true. Return now, confess plainly, ask for forgiveness for both the lust and the words spoken against Him, and ask for strength to walk a new way today. God is not ashamed to be called your Father when you come humbly.

I pray for you now that God would grant you repentance and peace, that He would forgive you through the blood of Jesus, that He would make the way of escape clear to you each time temptation comes and give you the will to take it, that He would heal your mind and renew your love for your wife and children, and that He would keep you from despair and teach you to live by faith day by day. Stay near Him, keep praying even when you feel nothing, and do not let go of His hand.

 

[Silas]

Your honesty is important and it matters that you shared it so openly. You are not alone in this struggle, even though it feels that way, and you have not shocked God. He already sees the wandering eyes, the lustful thoughts, the moments of falling into pornography, the exhaustion and the brokenness, and even the words you spoke against Him when you blamed Him. You are not fooling Him at all, so the best place to begin is to be completely honest with Him. Tell Him exactly how you feel, bluntly and frankly, without pretending. That kind of openness does not push Him away. It opens the door for Him to work, while hiding and pretending keeps the door closed.

That voice that says who do you think you are to ask God for help now after what you have done and said wants to keep you from coming to Him. That voice is not from God. People can be unmerciful and quick to tear you down, but God is merciful and gracious. It is far better to fall into the hands of God than into the hands of people. The moment you come to Him honestly and confess your sin and guilt, He is ready to wash it away. The very fact that you are still here, still convicted, still reaching out, is a sign of His patience and longsuffering toward you. He has not forsaken you. On the cross Jesus cried, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, so that you would never have to be forsaken.

God created us for fellowship with Him, but sin always brings alienation because a holy and pure God cannot have fellowship with sin. That is why the cross matters so much. Jesus, who knew no sin, was made to be sin for us, the just for the unjust, to put away the sin that separates us and to bring us back to God. That provision is for you right now, not just for the past. Scripture shows us again and again that God chooses and uses imperfect people. Your failure does not disqualify you from His love or from being used by Him. It is a reason to run to Him.

God has given you the capacity of choice. You can choose whether God will have a part in your life. You can choose to serve your flesh or to serve Him, to love Him or to turn from Him. Love for God is meaningful precisely because it is a choice. You are not a robot. Faith is not passive. God is not willing that any should perish and He desires to do so much more in your life, but He allows you to choose.

Part of that choice involves understanding what lust does and what God designed instead. From the beginning God established marriage as a man leaving his father and mother and cleaving to his wife and the two becoming one flesh. That cleaving, that faithful oneness, is His design. Lust attacks that design. It comes through the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, the same threefold pull that has tempted people from the start. Pornography feeds that pull. It heightens sexual stimulation and creates a false urgency that makes you want a sexual outlet without love, commitment, or covenant. It does not satisfy. It enslaves. It turns the heart away from God and from the wife God has given you, and it trains the eyes to wander.

If you have turned yourself over to those passions, even deliberately at times, you can become a slave to them. But God can deliver from slavery. He has restored those who made a terrible mess of their lives and became captive to their own choices. If He would restore someone like Manasseh, who deliberately rebelled against the God he knew and gave himself to his lusts until he was taken captive, He will do the same for you when you call upon Him and seek Him. He can heal, He can deliver, He can take you out of that captivity.

So do not give up and do not walk away from following Jesus. That thought to quit is part of what keeps you stuck. Instead, come back and recommit yourself to Him as if you are building an altar again and declaring that He is your God. That means three simple but serious actions. First, make confession to the Lord God. Agree with Him about your sin without excuse. Second, seek to do His pleasure, to live now to fulfill His will rather than the lusts of men. The time past is enough to have lived for those lusts. Third, separate yourself from what feeds the sin. That means decisive distance from pornography and from whatever feeds wandering eyes, and a deliberate turning toward your wife, to cleave to her, to honor her, to pursue oneness with her. God does not require more than your best, but He does ask that whatever you do in word or deed you do for His glory, as His representative.

You will need help to walk this out. Bring this into the light with a trusted, godly man who will hold you accountable, and stay in the Word and in honest prayer. Much of true prayer is simply worship, focusing on who God is and how great and merciful He is, and letting Him be the One who inspires your praying in the first place. He will give you compassion and strength you do not have on your own.

God still loves you and desires to restore the fellowship you once knew, even though you have violated His ways and become His enemy in your actions. He has not changed. Bring your brokenness, your shame, your anger, and your exhaustion to Him today, just as you are, and ask Him to forgive you through Jesus Christ and to lead you forward one day at a time. He is gracious and merciful and ready to forgive and to restore.