Overcoming pornography addiction

Living Among the Dead

Imagine that you are a man who is possessed by a demonic spirit. That spirit causes you to sit alone in the mountains and in cemeteries moaning and wailing and cutting yourself with sharp stones. Imagine the opportunity presents itself for you to be set free from the torment and anguish that you have known, possibly for as long as you can remember. You take advantage of the opportunity and in the process become a totally different person. You are ecstatic, but the people who knew you before can’t handle the sudden change and beg the person who presented the opportunity to you to leave your town.

Sound unreasonable? Yes, to some. Are you the man in the graveyard? Maybe. Could a person who was so far gone really have become a totally new person? Absolutely! Is the miracle worker, the One who sets us free, really ever asked to leave? Yes, every day!

The story of this man is told in Mark 5:2-19. The Bible says that he had an unclean spirit. One of the possible definitions of the word “unclean” in the original language is “lewd.” According to The American Heritage College Dictionary, “lewd” is defined as, “Preoccupied with sex and sexual desire; lustful, obscene; indecent.” Those words would have described me perfectly just a few years ago, and they probably describe other people now – possibly even you.

The biblical account tells how the man lived among the tombs and no matter how many times people tried to restrain him with chains, he would break them. No one was able to get him under control. To bring the story into modern times, it is the same with the sex and pornography addict. He (or she) lives among the dead – those people who have no spiritual life in them, people who have nothing to offer him except more of the deadly poison of perversion that he already has. Nothing anybody does to try to help him has any lasting effect. He gets himself under control for a few days, and then he’s back to the back room at the adult movie theatre. He’s back to the adult bookstores or else he checks into some hotel room with a young man who he has known for just under thirty minutes while his wife of twenty years waits at home, lonely and crying for just his compassionate embrace. The chains of assistance that his well-meaning friends offer just won’t hold him.

But then, he sees Jesus standing nearby. He knows the man is Jesus, because he recognizes him from an earlier time in his life. He worships Jesus, and ultimately finds himself set free for the first time from all the ugliness that has been his life. In the process he learned a great deal about himself and of where his life had taken him. There hadn’t been just one little demonic spirit “bothering” him occasionally. Instead, he found out that the unclean, or lewd, spirit that had lived in him was actually many spirits – perversion, pornography addiction, loneliness, low self-esteem, pedophilia, self-destruction, bitterness, unforgiveness, worthlessness, alcoholism, death, and more. There were so many that when Jesus cast them out, it took an entire heard of swine to provide new homes for them.

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The reaction of the people who had known him before surprised him, though. Instead of being happy for him, as he thought they should have been, they were afraid of the changes they had seen. They were so afraid that they begged Jesus, who had so miraculously changed his life, to leave town…to go away! Would any of us have done that? Maybe you wouldn’t have, but I’m afraid that there are many who would, and who do so on a daily basis.

Could the people who asked Jesus to leave have been like me? Or like you? Could they have been pornography addicts, sexual deviates, heroin or cocaine addicts, alcoholics, or perhaps even a combination of all? The reasons that the onlookers begged Jesus to leave were many, I believe. They were afraid of change, afraid that they might not like the new person. They were afraid that if they had to live among the living instead of among the dead, some habits might have had to be changed. There is light in life and only darkness among the dead. Scripture tells us that whatever is done in darkness will be exposed in the light. To live among the living would have meant that they would have had to leave behind the relationships they had built in the porn shops, at the bars, with the prostitutes on the street corners, with the people who sold them drugs to mask the unspeakable reality of their lifestyles.

The people who had seen the drastic change in the man may have been afraid that the lifestyle they’d lived had been based on lies and fantasy rather than on truth and reality. They had believed the man could not be made whole and still did not want to believe it, even after they saw evidence to the contrary.

The man whose life was changed had an entirely different view of the miracle, though. He was so excited to see himself clothed and in his right mind that he begged Jesus to allow him to tag along with Him to His next stop. He was excited because he knew that what he had experienced was real. He, better than anyone else, knew that a genuine miracle had taken place. No one, including those who had made fun of him and laughed at him for years, could tell him that it hadn’t happened. Some of those people had even joked about his depravity. Perhaps they had laughed at his inability to develop meaningful relationships with anyone more real than the unknown, unclothed exploited person in some photograph. Now there was no reason to laugh. Their source of demented pleasure had been taken from them.

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There is one reason for the man wanting to follow Jesus that I think outweighed all others. He trusted Jesus. He had experienced first hand a touch of God that changed his mental condition. He knew without a doubt that he could trust Jesus to keep away the loneliness, the shame of his sordid past, and the hideous desires that had danced through his mind. He knew that he could trust Jesus to be there when he called on Him.

Are you the person who had lived unchained among the dead, as I had? If so, then you know the excitement that this man felt. You know what a person feels when the burden of a painful, unwanted lifestyle is lifted. You understand how all the man wanted to do was to follow Jesus. And you understand it when all the person can do is to tell others about the miraculous touch of God on his life.

Are you the one who has joyfully seen another person so dramatically changed that he left his past behind him and started a new life among the living? Or are you the partner in sin – the past – that the man left behind? Are you afraid you’ll not be able to make it when you can no longer hide in the darkness of a life among the dead? If so, you’re not alone. I’ve been that person who was afraid to live among the living, knowing that my entire life as I had known it would become just another memory. But, I’ve also been the man whom Jesus changed. I am that person today and I can promise you that there is nothing to fear among the living. And yes, you will find out that the lifestyle you left among the tombs was indeed one based on lies. But that’s okay! There is indeed life among the living and you’ll know Him when you see Him!

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