The Christian and Healing Our Sexual Struggles - Part 1

[Music] [Music] [Music] he [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] he [Music] [Music] [Music] ladies and gentlemen, looking forward to spending some time with you today. We are going to take a journey. If you're ready for a journey, buckle up, 'cause we're going to get into some topics that involve everyone, 'cause it has to do with the journey of sex, your sexuality, your sex drive, sexual struggles, sexual bondage, all that kind of stuff that people struggle with and battle with. What does that look like? So we're going to do this Mar de Jesu style. We need to be able to do this with no condemnation and no shame, but we also need to be able to take a look into what's really going on and what do we need to address. Be with you in just a [Music] moment. [Music] [Music]

Welcome, everyone, to this broadcast. Mark De Jesus here, your brother from another mother, is here in the house, and I am so happy to be able to be with you to spend some time sharing with you and taking a journey when it comes to a battleground that deals with everybody's life, because it has to do with sex, sexuality. What are our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviors around this? What does it look like to navigate this as a Christian in a healthy way? Going to dive into this subject and take you on a journey with me. I had to just before the broadcast double-check Rumble. There were a couple things that were not working, but it's working now. And also live here on YouTube. YouTube, good to see everybody here in the feed. Uh, a couple things I want to say up front. Uh, number one, I'm going to be talking about sex. So those of you that are parents, uh, many of you like to take this and put it up on your TV and have it just playing in the house while your kids are playing with blocks. Uh, this is one of those broadcasts I'd ask you not do that, because I'm going to talk about all kinds of things and battlegrounds. I don't have a problem talking about any issue when it comes to sexual battles and struggles, but I am aware, and I, I guess I could say hyper-aware, of who am I talking to. So when I'm broadcasting this publicly, like, you don't know who's listening, and you know, sometimes that makes it a little bit challenging, but we're, I'm going to go for it nonetheless. But just wanted to say that to parents to let you know up front. Also want to let you know, thank you, uh, for any shout-outs and prayers yesterday, because we, we knowed that broadcast while it was going on, there was quite a storm that was building, and right towards the end, my wife came in, gave me a signal, uh, uh, it's getting bad out there. And I stepped outside, and we had some severe flooding going on, and I spent a good half hour, 45 minutes, uh, pushing, uh, clogs out of drainage and stuff like that. Uh, where we live, we have to just be aware that the drains don't get clogged and backed up. And, and, uh, then, then I had, uh, I was knee-deep in some water in our backyard where our fence was collapsing. So just imagine that, about 20 minutes after I finished the broadcast and was out, I was outside in in boots up to my knees in water with a poncho and an umbrella and a shovel trying to, trying to move debris that was, uh, causing our fence to collapse. So anyways, I do say, Lord willing, and the creek don't rise, I ain't playing, because sometimes the creek rises. We had this happen last year a number of times, and the county came over and they said, well, this was a one in 100-year storm. So I guess the years are getting a lot closer together, because it happened again. It was, this one was even more intense, but, uh, we're prepared for it. We, we handled it well. So this is wonderful to be with you all today. Do me a favor, click that like button and subscribe. I am going to be sharing a journey. I'm going to be taking a journey with you all, and many of the things I mentioned may lead towards resources. You can go to maris.com and hear more about this. And the thing I want to bring out at the top is my goal is to take you on a journey. I, I answer questions, I address things, but when I address subjects, I like to value the long-form journey. So I'm going to take us on a journey when it comes to our sexuality, our sexual battles. I'll see where we go. I do have some questions that inspired me to go. I'm going to do a live on this topic. So I decided to do some lives this week, change it up a bit. Normally, I do kind of set videos that I upload, uh, for you to receive and enjoy, but this is going to be a live. Be sure to catch my live from yesterday on confusion over God's voice, and I could have called it today, confusion over sex and the battles and struggles that come along with that. And I will probably tomorrow, I'm going to have a Q&A for the community. And we do have, uh, what's called the Healing and Freedom Community. It's an online community that has access to my courses, materials, and Q&A. And tomorrow, I'll be hosting a Q&A for the community. And then I think Friday, I'm going to do another live broadcast. So stay tuned for that. Be sure to subscribe on YouTube. I know especially you can get, uh, notifications of when a live is scheduled. I try to schedule them, uh, as soon as I can. Rumble only gives me 24 hours. I can't tell Rumble, hey, I'm going to do a live Sunday if it's Wednesday. I have to, I can only do 24-hour scheduling. So that makes, makes that a little bit tricky, but, but keep an eye on those areas.

Let's talk about sex, shall we? Um, in the comment section, all of you that are welcome. Uh, if you do have a question as I'm talking, first, take the journey with me. But if you do have a question, I do keep an eye out for super chats. You can, um, also email questions too. I don't know that I'll get to the email here in the middle of this live broadcast, but I'll keep an eye on on what I can keep an eye on. I have, I, I have to somewhat multitask and watching the technical aspects, watching my mixer, make sure it doesn't act funky and get any demonic interference, and, uh, also have a complete sentence and a complete thought. We're going to do this Mark De Jesus style. So when it comes to our sexual battles and sexual struggles, number one, we don't talk about it very much, do we? You know, hear about it in church every once in a while. You have a series, talk about it, you know, and there's some, there's that's the first problem. And don't you think that something that you think about a lot and you deal with every day is something that should be talked about in your life? Now, I don't know. I'm not putting on the church. It's a church's responsibility to, uh, carry these things because really, this goes back to the home. This goes back to parenting. But I don't know about you, uh, how many conversations, helpful conversations, did you have growing up on the topic of sex? I will wait. And it's interesting, something that men think about every day, all day, and something that women think about every other day, is not really talked about in our lives and in our journey. And when it is talked about, it's talked about not in the beauty of what God created it for, but in the lens of, don't do this, don't do that, don't do this. And that's always going to create some problems when the emphasis is don't do. But we don't have an emphasis on what is good and what is great and what is wonderful. And I think that one of the things I try to teach people is to remove the shame off the subject because that's one of the biggest challenges. Because with our sexual upbringing, as far as how we were taught, our experiences, our traumas and dramas, the neglect of talking about it, there's a lot of awkwardness, there's a lot of uncleanness, a lot of shame and darkness and struggle. And I think that it's important that you learn how to navigate a healing journey when it comes to sex, your sex drive, how you approach this subject, how you look at it. We live in a world of massive confusion, massive confusion. And the world is saying, hey, we need to bring this subject out into the open. We have discussions on it, true, but then they bring along with it a changing standard of what healthy sexuality even looks like. So I say all that to say, I sympathize with the nightmare of struggle that it is for believers to navigate this. When you look in the body of Christ, not much talking about it. No one talked about it in your family and upbringing, except maybe a joke here or there, or maybe some clean encounter that you had growing up with your father's pornography collection, or a trauma that you had in your life. And then the world's going, hey, let's talk about it. What the world's, uh, standard is like a piece of hay floating in the wind that goes left and right and all over the place and up and down and, and, uh, has no groundedness and stability. God, God established a way for for sex to be a beautiful thing. And sin in Satan's kingdom has certainly jumped into this area and, uh, pulled out of our brokenness and pulled out of the areas of, of pain and emptiness and and lack of equipping. So I'm going to go into some tangents. I'll get into, um, I'll definitely get into the battle of pornography, sex drive, masturbation. Um, may get into some sexual like, like identity, attraction, OCD, and intrusive thoughts, kind of stuff. We'll, we'll see where it goes. And then now and then, I'll take a, a water break with my vitamin-infused water, uh, combined with my ESP Pellegrino. Not that they are sponsoring this, but, uh, I do appreciate a little bubbly while I am working and talking here.

Now, when the church addresses, historically, the church has been very condemning regarding sexual battles. You go back in history, and it's just, it's, it's full of shame, hellfire, and brimstone. A lot of yelling, a lot of condemning. Meanwhile, there wasn't heart-connected healing help that's taken place. So, so if you've had that bit of experience, welcome to the club. That's been historically what's been going on. The church does a lot of focus on chasing symptoms, though, when it comes to the struggle of sexual battles, particularly. We get into areas like pornography, for example, and I'll get into that more and more. We tend to focus on accountability, accountability partners. We tend to focus on, you need to have a web browser filtered thingy-ma-jig, or you need to have, uh, some type of app that you put on your phone, and you need to have some accountability system in place. And you can have all those things, and not that those things are bad, I'm not saying those are bad, but they're very incomplete. They, in and of themselves, do not bring freedom. Because I know people that have, uh, had filters and they found technical ways to get around them. I know, um, people who have, in great anger, and God, I'm going to give my all to you, and they just try harder. And they take their whole pornography collection and throw it in the dumpster. This is talking, I'm starting to date myself now, my history, how far it goes back, because we're talking about, you know, actual porn, pornographic magazines, throw them in the dumpster. And then a few days later, he's dangling over the inside of the dumpster going and grabbing and getting getting those things. Because the, the emotional energy that happens in sex drive is incredibly, incredibly strong. And so if we don't get to the heart and root of things, you can, you can put all those things into place, and eventually we go back because we're not dealing with the root system of why we're having these battles. Sex is very, very near and dear to identity, to relationship, to how you process relationship. There's so much in there. But we've been symptom chasers. Christians have been notorious for being symptom chasers. If, um, if you struggle to read your Bible, then we go, well, here's a five-minute Bible app that you need. And, um, and we, you know, here's a, I'm struggling with my prayer life. We don't get to the heart of what's going on that God could bring help to, because he's all about the heart. That's why we call our ministry Turning Hearts Ministries International, not Turning Heads, Turning Minds, um, because God is about this. And there are things going on here that yes, involve how you relate to sex, what's been your training, upbringing, and what your battlegrounds. And this affects everybody. This affects and impacts everyone. So we chase symptoms and we focus on the word lust. I'm going to get into lust a little bit because there's a lot of confusion around that word, how the Bible translates it, how it's understood. But even in using that word lust, in the, in the form of it being meaning, uh, sexual desires going in places it shouldn't, it is still somewhat symptomatic. Lust is like a large branch that leads to those things, but still not, it's still not a root area that we're, we're, we're addressing. Because what lust is, is lust reveals the absence of true love. And what the love of God brings, lust is a love and intimacy issue. It's about connection. It's about feeling loved. It's about feeling safe. It's about feeling secured in. It's about feeling tucked in, held. It's about your emotional ties, how you form your ties. And I'll repeat this and get into this some more, because when it comes to the subject of love, love is, is, is, is revealed through our Father in Heaven. God is love. He doesn't just have love, he is love. He was demonstrated through the work of Jesus Christ, who showed us the love of the Father. If you want to understand how the Father thinks and sees you, watch me, because when you see me, you see my Father. I'm a reflection of my Father. We are meant to be a reflection of our Father. So this leads us to our Father, earthly father connection, because your earthly fathers were designed to instill love in you, instill identity, and instill in you a sense of belonging, acceptance, a sense of acceptance, which those are the areas that lust taps into. Because when you don't have the love of the Father embedded in your heart and life in a meaningful way, where you've been discipled in it, you've been taught to experience it, then the Father of Lies steps in and tries to become your evil stepfather to now be the voice to give you pathways of relief, of escape, of pleasure that lead to bondage and then block you from intimacy, connection with Father God, or feel they block you, because God is still near, God is still here. But there is something interesting that happens when we chase the route. The Father of Lies gives us is on the back end. He shames us for it, and that shame creates a sense of deep disconnect to relationship. We withdraw from relationship with God. And then this is what Christians fall into in, in, in the realization of, of sexual sin and struggle. We try to fix ourselves, and we do a lot of religious performance and church activity, and we go, I'm going to amplify all the things that I, I, I, I need to do. I need to pray more, I need to get in the word more. And we put more self-effort into it. We amplify that to try to make ourselves feel better and try to earn our way back into good standing. And what we've not done is we've not recognized the Father's. We've, we've come into a lot of rejection that causes us to try to fix ourselves from a distance rather than soberly recognizing what I need is I need true love, and the counterfeit is coming into my life.

We also have another aspect of our upbringing that's important to reflect on and learn in your journey, because again, we're taking a journey today, and I'm going to ask you some questions. I'm going to lead you through some process. I get a lot of questions that come in, and I'm going to direct people to this broadcast so they can walk through. This is the aspect of how, how you deal with pain. Because many of us, in our pain, in our struggle, in our emptiness, we look to sex to be something to medicate those areas of pain. For example, in a, a man who does not have a healthy connection with his earthly father, he will look to the woman and her attractiveness and desire her, and he will pursue that to heal the wound of a father. And a woman cannot heal the wound that a father has left in your life. And a woman who is not loved and seen and established in emotional equipping and shown she is loved and seen and valued, she will look to men. She will look to the man to then satisfy those needs of her life. And only the Father can fill that. And that is why God is the Father to the fatherless. Because ultimately, our parents are going to have their limitations. They can only go so far. They have their weaknesses. There's no perfect parent. And so we have to, in coming into relationship with God, this is why I emphasize the Father's love so much. And and why I am very frustrated with the modern church is is avoiding the Father. The church today is avoiding, uh, the Father's heart, even though Jesus talked non-stop about it and said, every, I don't even say anything unless my Father says it. If you see me, you see my Father. And I'm going to teach you how to go to the Father. And the church has, ever, ever since been avoiding the Father. You know why? Because of our earthly dad relationships. It's uncomfortable. So we're uncomfortable with our Father. We're uncomfortable with sex. We're uncomfortable talking about sex. We're uncomfortable where our struggles go because we're chasing symptoms and we're not realizing our sexual battles reveal a longing of a Father's heart.

Then there's the area of nurture. And nurture is the place of, what do you do when you're in pain? And we live in a society that is constantly, we, we have a mindset of when pain arises, we go to things that just don't satisfy, that just don't fulfill the longing of our heart. And nurture is incredibly important. Of course, I talk about the mother's heart and the nurture that she brings because it's so special. A father brings nurture, but a mother brings nurture that is unique and powerful in itself. And combined, it's meant to be a healing salve in your journey where you're equipped to know how to relate to yourself. But when you lack nurture, you feel disconnected from God. And here's another thing, when you lack nurture, you feel disconnected from yourself. So when you're in pain, you leave yourself hanging. And then we add on to it trauma and and neglect and all these things that we're struggling with, you disconnect from yourself. So pornography, for example, gives us a, a, uh, evil stepfather's counter, uh, uh, um, an alternative, a counterfeit. That was the word I was looking for, a counterfeit pathway that doesn't ever allow you to see the need that you have. So, for example, you're lonely, and you've been conditioned into loneliness and depression and low feeling. Go to the porn. You grab your phone, you grab your, your laptop, you start, you start wandering around. Or you maybe you have that place that you go to because dopamine creates these ties, you know, and many of us in our lack of tie, you actually, you create, uh, mental, emotional, some could say even spiritual ties to pornographic, uh, actors or actresses or people that have been portrayed. And who knows, now we're an artificial intelligence, so that people may not even be real. But you develop a fantasy tie. Now that like creates this relational tie that's there. See how this can kind of get so entangled? And what do we never actually do? We never actually deal with the need of emptiness. So when we go to porn, we disconnect from ourselves. We have an altered state of experience because we haven't been taught how to work through loneliness and how to actually become your best friend instead of your biggest enemy. So you engage the pornography, which is, which is majority followed by masturbation. And after it, there is shame and intense guilt and comes about because of the lack of equipping, and you're your own worst enemy. You believe that lie. And so this pathway unfolds, and now you are beating yourself up, distant from God. And what's the church saying? You need to get in the word more, you need to pray more, you need to get more involved. You know what? Get more involved in church. You need to do these things. And no one's going, hey, so tell me your journey when it comes to sex, how do you feel loved? We're like, get the lust out of your life. And, and it's legitimate. Lust is a, is a thing. You know, the Bible talks about lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, the pride of life. But they, what teach you about how to cultivate normal desire and to see desire and what it can be in your life, and how to interpret that and not let desire that turns into what we call lust, uh, take over? How to practice self-control? How to delay gratification? No, we've all become addicts, haven't we? So if we're not addicted to porn, we're addicted to overworking and workaholism, we're addicted to to church involvement. Mark mentioned porn in the same sentence as overworking, church [Laughter] involvement. Oh, uh, or, or we need a substance to cause us to escape, or we need, uh, food, or we need a person, we need something to get us out of what we're feeling right now. When actually the solution is, I need to face what's here right now. I don't know how to do that, Mark. Well, that's, that's where we start going, I need to learn, I need to heal, and I need to grow. Because Christians aren't dealing with their sex addictions soberly. We react in shame. We panic, react, and we try to, you know, many, I deal with so many OCS, so they're, they're always confessing. You know, they got to confess to someone, or they publicly confess. And I'm not, excuse me, I get, I get allergies every now and then, so I, you, I'm always itching my nose, and you have to bear with me, know, or pray for me, or both. I'm not into these public confessions. I'm not into going online and publicly confessing. Uh, you may need an area. I'm not into obsessive compulsive confession, too. But you need to be sober and go, okay, this problem is happening. I need help, and I need to find appropriate ways to go through it. I remember as a youth pastor, teenagers would get up, and, um, I saw this in, in avenues where I wasn't in charge, because if I was, I'd mute the mic and go, hey, we're going to go to a commercial break. A kid would get up at camp or at youth group and want to confess his, his porn addiction. That's not the setting to do that. That's not the setting to do that. Why? Because, um, sexual struggles, they're very personal. And, um, I wanted, I want to ensure that the, the environment's safe. And in a public form and setting like that, about three-quarters of the room is going to now go, oh, that's, that's the guy who's got the porn issue. Uh, because the average Christian doesn't have a grace lens in seeing people separate from their sin battles. That you may have a sin battle, but that doesn't mean that's who you are. Oh, snap. Mark already in it. You may have a sexual battle, sexual temptation, that's not who you are. Now, modern psychology is like, they're losing, they're losing their marbles. They're like, well, maybe you need to discover this and discover that. Maybe this is who you are. Maybe you need that. That's one of the many areas I get frustrated with modern therapy and psychology. It's meant to hold the standard of what's healthy and what's not. We have decades and years of documented research on the power of the family and sexual identity and all the disorders. And now they're changing definitions and changing things left and right. I've got two, two manuals back here. One's the DSM-4, one's the DSM-5. I don't know that I'm interested in buying the next one because I think the next one's going to have all reformatted definitions, um, and, and basically removing studies and showing the the power of the family and how sexual sexuality gets formed and what are healthy patterns and what are not. So there's all kinds of branches that this goes into. Okay. But just because you have, have a thought, you have an emotion, you have a battle, that doesn't mean that's who you are. And many of you go, is this me? What this, this thought, this me? Because sexual thoughts and emotions are felt. There's a, there's a surging feeling like nothing else. Right? God designed for it to be set in the context of marriage. Now, that's the place that he designed for it to be between, between a man and a woman. I feel like I always have to say these things, husband and wife. You know, uh, I think by now, you, you get it. But I got a lot of OCS, they watch my videos and they're like, how does he feel about same-sex marriage? How does he feel about this? What, you know, it's like, I got to have like a portfolio I hand them of here's the checklist of my beliefs, you know, am I okay to talk to you? But we, um, just feeling me, is it intrusive thought? And we haven't learned and been discipled in, you could have any crazy squirrely thought in the world arrive at you. You could feel it going through your entire nervous system. That does not mean that's who you are. And I can stand on the authority of God's word and even point you to Paul's understanding that he brought. And when I get to heaven, because I'm going to heaven and I meet Paul, I'm going to say, thanks for Romans 7. Appreciate that, bro. I said, I know you got a long line. I'll see you, maybe I'll meet you like 3,000 years from now, but, uh, we'll talk more. But thanks for Romans 7. Appreciate that, bro. Me, me a lot, because he said, even when I sin, it's not me doing it. Whoa. Right now, he's, he's not implying like a husband who has an affair and his wife finds out and the guy's like, it wasn't me, it was the devil. That's not, he's, that's not what he's talking about. He's not advocating, you know, responsibility for our actions and what we do and where we take thoughts and how we live. What he's doing is helping to recognize what's going on unseen that's taking place in our battlegrounds. So I even get into this because I deal with OCD so much, and we have people that have intrusive thoughts about, uh, that are sexual in nature. They may be around, may be a man around a man, they have a same-sex, a woman around a woman, they have a same-sex, uh, intrusive sexual thought. Someone with the opposite sex, someone who's younger, someone who's older, someone who's someone else who's married, and they have a thought come in. And the, the first thing that trips them up, maybe this is something I wanted because it created an arousal in them. They feel aroused, right? This, it shows us we've been so conditioned to just like, whatever our feelings say and whatever the first assumption of interpretation comes to our mind, uh, we just follow it. We don't know how to, how to respond kindly and graciously and go, okay, this is, this is just a feeling that's, that's working through. And I can let it work through. Um, going through puberty, when, uh, both boys and girls, so many changes are going and taking place, where was the voice speaking into our lives to help us with interpretation, rather than just going, these boys with their raging hormones, and we just demeaned it. We demeaned it. And we've been demeaning men, sex drive, you dirt, these dirty men, yeah, he's looking, looking at things, you dirty men, all these dirty men out there, just yucky, that, that just constant hypnotic programming, just men are dirty, men are just dirty, men are just dirty. So we've taken man's, uh, attraction of beauty, we've demeaned it. So now when a man, uh, has a sense, oh, she's, she's beautiful, or even a man sees another man, goes, that's a handsome guy. It can't be just that. It's, what does that mean? Maybe that means something, maybe that means something about me, maybe something about you, maybe something, oh, right. Or a woman to not see the, the beauty of, of who she is. The Bible talks about the glory of God that rests upon her, and the beauty that is revealed, not just in attraction and how she looks physically and in her physical traits, but also in her emotional, relational beauty. And there's just a glory of God that Paul said, angels pay attention to. Don't ask me to explain what that means. Just like her hair is a glory, and the angels are like, like, whoa, bro, could you to bring that back in? What did that mean? And that's in one of those, well, you didn't explain it any further. It's kind of a mystery, right? So the devil loves taking simple relationship and turning it sexual. Man, I had a nice conversation with that lady. Oh, it's nice. Oh, maybe I like her. Maybe I have feelings for her. Maybe I could. We, we, we have no reference in how to just relate. When I was a pastor, I had talked a lot about with my congregation about what it means to live as brothers and sisters, because I said, I said to the guys, there's a problem that, that, that men have. Can we just be honest here? Is that your brain kind of registers, I'm attracted to her, so I'm going to kind of, you know, hey, you know, like I was talking to the single guys, right? You kind of like, you know, you hang around a little longer, see if you can get an opportunity to talk to her. And that's fine. That's fine. That's fine. But I said, but then the ones that maybe you're not attracted to, you just kind of ignore as well. They don't even exist. And I said, what you're not developing is your muscle to learn how to be a brother and to interact with the opposite sex in healthy ways. My wife and I, even one Sunday, because we would just, we would just deal with things as, as, as you deal with them, we had a conversation, her and I, of talking about just healthy, appropriate interactions of, like, even things like hugging. There's some things we can do to just respect each other. And hugging, because you get these huggers, right? These huggers that are just like, you know, when they, when you get to them, they're just like, whoa, that's a lot right there. And then you get to the people that are like, they hug like this, you know, right? And it's just understanding where people are at and appropriateness and things like that to honor each other, to respect each other. And like, you know, gentlemen, don't just hold the door for a lady because you want to get a date with her. Hold the door in general, right? Hold the door. Well, that's, uh, that's toxic masculine. I, I don't, I don't care. I'm not letting the world be a dictator of what God says and how men were designed to show honor to the beauty and glory of and respect for who a woman is. Okay. Um, that could get into a whole subject in itself. When I walk and talk, I get all these branches and I go, hm, should I go down that road? Should I not go down that road? Right. But, um, the first, like, we, we have to realize you're going to have all kinds of thoughts and emotions because you weren't taught. You got no references. You got no equipping. There was, there was no wholesome, and again, I'm going to say some things here, this isn't for kids. You didn't have moments except when your parents caught you masturbating, and then they were like, oh, is this awkward moment? And that's about it. Maybe they said something, or maybe they whipped out a book and go, here's some pictures, here's some things, okay, go have a nice life. That's not equipping. Um, equipping involves, number one, bringing a comfortability with talking about the subject. Now, it needs to be done appropriately, for sure, right? I'm not just saying that you just flippantly, just whatever, although, um, every now and then, you know, you're just giggling and laughing because we're talking about something that can be awkward, but you face the awkwardness, you work through it, and you talk about it. I think there needs to be way more conversations in families. But how we, how do we navigate this thing in our lives that affects us every day? Every day for men, every five minutes, or every 30 seconds, or five seconds. Guys laugh when I go, it's a thing we think about every day, all day. And things women think about every other day. Um, so, so you may have an emotion, you may have a feeling, but we have to learn, what do we do with this? And we have to first start with putting shame away. Okay? Because you had a feeling, you had a feeling. Okay. Two, is the love of the Father that equips us in how to handle our emotions and how to handle our emotional life. Because our sex drive is highly affected by how we learn to love. Because your sex drive will even increase in certain ways out of an unmet need. And once we participate in it, whether it's through the physical actual act of fornication, or actual act of adultery, or the fantasy version in pornography, or whatever other kind of examples we could use, what we're really longing for is we're longing for loving connection. But we've been programmed now to go down a counterfeit path. And now dopamine's getting, getting programmed within us. Dopamine, once it gets programmed into a certain pathway, it takes time to reset it. I remember in my addict work and and research work with addictions, I remember seeing how when somebody takes cocaine for the first time, and it hits dopamine receptors at such an intense level, and they get such an intense high, that now begins to program their addictive pathways to go back and revisit that. But they never actually get it. So they're on a, a decline, often. And so they need more for that. And this is what happens with our addictions. Is we get into patterns where we go to it to get the dopamine hit, then we go to it more, then we go to it more. Um, and we get programmed to look for a dopamine hit rather than maybe some oxytocin, maybe like endorphins, or maybe, uh, settling, uh, serotonin levels, although I have my issues with how mental health, uh, communic, serotonin and chemical imbalance, the term that's used, that's a whole subject in itself. But instead of the relational grounding where we need a hug, we need emotional connection, we go to dopamine. So we become a dopamine-programmed people. We look for the high when we're low, rather than looking for the balance. Love balances you, but love takes time. Love's a journey. Love waits. Love has self-control. Love slows down. Love faces pain. Lust is, it's always avoiding pain. It, and lust teaches us to become very self. We, we want to gratify self. When you're, when you're driven by lust, you're not looking to help bless someone else or meet someone else's needs. You become, you become very, very self-focused in how you're, um, how you're approaching life. James even talked about, you have not because you ask not, which that's interesting. Says you have not because you ask not. Uh, he's saying you have needs, but you don't ask. You don't ask God. Very, very interesting passage here. A lot, I don't know that we see it. And so let me explain it. He says, you have not because you ask not. This is our lust addiction world. You have needs, but you don't bother asking God. Why? Because there's a disconnect. He doesn't hear. He doesn't listen. I'm not connected to him. Why bother? It's my prayers don't work. I don't hear them. Or, and so we, we live busy lives and we get distracted because connection and intimacy with God is, that's too complicated. And it's, it's messy. And I, I have too much, I have too, too much battles in my life, and God doesn't love me, right? That's why the love of the Father is so important. Because then you learn to talk to your Father. What does a Father want? Wants his kids to talk to him. We tell that to our kids all the time. Just tell us, go through something, just tell us, just tell us. You have not because you ask not. And then when you ask, you ask amiss, like, like your requests are off. He's like, why? Because you spend it, you're spending it on your lust. Because dopamine's taken over. Dopamine's taking over. And now, whether it's cocaine, sex, or sugar, wait, he said sugar and sex addiction in the same sense. What, whatever that is, you chase that, and it takes over. So you lose the ability to have self-control. You lose the ability to be sober. And when you're sober, you see your pain for what it is. And so a lot of the healing journey when it comes to sexual battles is restoring sobriety to see the deep-rooted pain. It's not so deep you can't find it. It's deep-rooted in that you've been ignoring it for so long to escape because we use, uh, sexual pleasure as a way to escape the current pain, to numb it, to not be present in it. That's why I often tell people who have porn addictions, you need a hug, and you need lots of them, and you need a new relationship with yourself because you're leaving yourself hanging by escaping, constantly escaping, escaping. Nope, want to teach you to be right here. But we have a lot of shame and uncleanness. In my pastoring work, I, I taught on uncleanness. I even taught on unclean spirits. The Bible uses that a lot because it's a, it's a, when you see evil spirits in the Bible, they're often called unclean spirits because that's what it produces as a byproduct. It's a part of it. Part of what Satan's kingdom does is just leave it. It teaches us to look at sex in a dirty way, and teaches us to look at it from an unclean way. And the Bible even talks about sin has an effect, a sexual sin, I should say, has an effect on us that's a bit different. I know when we talk about sin, like sin is sin, but the Bible does say there's a, when you have sexual sin, you sin against your own body. That's very interesting. In fornication, and in, in pornography, and adultery, you're actually committing an act of violent, uh, harmful sin to your body. Now, because we have so much legalism, and we have so much like black and white rules, and we, we, we, we're so accused by the Bible, we don't see it. The Bible has a lot of instruction in even in sex where it's about harnessing the beauty of honoring your body. This is actually seeing yourself with self-compassion and self-love. Your body is precious. Now, if I'm the devil, all I got to do is disconnect you from your earthly father, so you have no compass from that. Disconnect you from nurture, and disconnect you from yourself, because then you won't see honor in your body. I'll show you in this. Let me show you in this. Are you guys, are you guys following me so far? Because I know this is going to cause all kinds of comments of rabbit trails and this and what about this and what about that and what about this and what about the dinosaurs? And, um, yeah, let me bring this verse up here. Um, are we, we working on, okay? Uh, don't mind my double thing here, 'cause I got a couple things I want to reference. Uh, where is that verse? Where am I? I mean, oh, I'm over here. I'm James. I got James over here on the left. On the right, I got Romans. Romans 1:24. Look at this. Therefore, God also gave them up to uncleanness. What does that mean? That's, that's a whole teaching itself. Uh, this is a cultural speaking. Romans 1 is a cultural picture of what happens at the fall of culture. This is America right now. This is where we are. This is the blueprint. It's, there's nothing new. It's, this is the blueprint for where America and the world is right now. And so God goes, okay, I'm giving you over. This is what you want. This is what you want. Because as a culture, we've, we've declared this is how we want to live. This is how we want to be. So he says, okay, um, you want to live in this uncleanness, in the lust of your hearts, to what? To do what? Dishonor your body. So if I, if I want to experience healing in how I relate to sex and sexuality, wherever the battleground goes, you have to start learning to come into alignment with being, instead of being disconnected from yourself, you actually have to learn how to come back into connection with yourself. Stop avoiding yourself. Stop avoiding yourself, which is at the heart of God loves me and I love myself. Can I emphasize that enough? Because many are separated from themselves, and that's what your trauma and drama and neglect did. It caused you to turn on yourself. And the Bible says, a house divided against itself cannot stand. You against you, you're going, you're going to crumble. And so part of healing is coming into appreciation with how you're made, how you're wired. I grew up hating myself. I hated how I looked. You, when I was, when I was born, my, my head was too big. The doctors were like, we got to check his head. It's, it's, it's, it's larger than normal. We got to keep an eye on that. I had a big head. I could never fit a hat on my head. My, my, my teeth have a, I have a, I have an underbite, and the only thing that was going to help that would be major surgery. I have to have my jaw pushed back and this done. And, and I've had a gut, a little bit of a gut, most of my life. And, let's go on and on. I walked funny. I probably still walk funny. All these things, right, contributed to just animosity. But you know what helps so much in restoration? It's coming to appreciate the temple. Paul said, you, you're, you're the temple of the Holy Ghost. We don't get the heart of it. He's bringing out, you're precious, and how you're made, who, who you're made is a treasure. And when we are in sexual sin and participating with it, we're dishonoring this beautiful vessel. There's a, there's, there's an attack of sin that's throwing weaponization at our physical bodies. So I made the decision, before you even get into how do I get rid of porn, how do I get already do this, we're going to get to the root system. Let's get shame out. Let's let love enter. Love needs to fill that place so your evil stepdad can get kicked out. And the Father who created you, the Father of Lights, where there is no, uh, wavering or shadow of turning, is a good Father who's not put these sexual temptations on you. God cannot tempt you with evil, okay? He's not putting this on you. He says, well, God made me this way. No, he didn't. That's a lie. Step, evil stepdad, evil stepdad's talking, right? We got to get clarity on Father. That's why I say, who told you that? Getting the shame off of, I had a sexual thought, I had, think I felt emotion, I felt it, okay? Everybody does. Happens in different ways, different, and depending on your journey, you have certain avenues it goes into. And to be, to be quite honest, you have a lot of stuff in your generations. You have a lot of stuff in your generations and what's passed down. I would see, like, for an example, you see this over and over again, um, you know, people that, uh, maybe had had a baby out of wedlock, right? And unless that, like, was worked through or dealt with and healed, 'cause a lot of times what we would do is kind of hide that, hide that under the carpet, kind of thing, you know, just move on and just.

Bring it before God. Let it work through our lives. It's not, it's not even about like just asking for forgiveness. It's about what are the mindsets that lead to that? Because I'm passing those mindsets down. And then I'd see the next generation actually repeat it. Same time, same age, same circumstances. It's, it's the work of iniquity. It just gets passed down from generation to generation. So we're like, "Pray out the generational lust." No, let's work on the generational rejection. Let's, and that's a process. That's a journey. Let's, the things in our generations that caused us to have a disconnect to love, a disconnect to authenticity.

Right, when you're shifting the generations, this isn't like a prayer, or you go to a deliverance session, or you have somebody on YouTube pray for you. "I break every generational curse." That sounds great. It's like a nice pep rally, and people like, "Yeah!" You yell louder as though the devil's like, "Oh, they're yelling. Oh, they're yelling. I didn't hear them. They were yelling." Right? These things are ships that turn as generations make a change of serving in their life. They set a new paradigm. I'm setting a new paradigm for the next generation. I'm not trying to pray one little prayer right now that breaks things off of my kids. I'm changing how I live in every way of my life to create a new template.

Cuz many of you carry a template of sex in your generations and how you relate to sex. I'm half Puerto Rican, half Scandinavian. Very interesting worlds of difference, right? In, um, in my father's, uh, my father's side, the Puerto Rican side, which goes back to not just Puerto Rico, goes back to Spain, some of it goes back to areas of Africa, some of it goes back to areas of Saudi Arabia. Stuff like that. Wild when you study and look at those genetic testings and stuff like that, right? Uh, there's a lot of, uh, very obvious sexual sins, not committing and getting married. A lot of, uh, babies out of wedlock, baby daddies, and fathers not being present, not staying engaged. That's a, that gets passed down from generation to generation. And lack of father equipping, lack of father presence. So that's going to amplify sexual temptation. You bring a father absence, that's going to amplify that. Uh, a lot of uncleanness. I can get into all kinds of stories of things and relatives and up the line of what was participated, what was agreed with.

But there, there's some, there's some aspects of grace that I can see in the saving work of God and what he's doing that led to me now. I wasn't directly raising some of those. Some of those patterns and behaviors. I exposed and saw some stuff that I, you know, wish I didn't see or wish, you know. But, um, I've had to in my journey recognize, okay, those are things God is unwinding from my life as I'm allowing my mind to be renewed, stage after stage, journey after journey. Because mindsets follow generations. When I sit down and talk to you, I'm getting a mixture of your mom and dad sitting right in front of me. And if I met your parents, I can go, "Okay, I see that. Okay, I see that." Right? And what we do is we go, we run from that. "I'm being like my dad." We run from it. And what do you end up doing? You end up repeating it. Because either out of fear or resentment, right? That's why working through fear and working through forgiveness is really important. Because then it allows you to soberly walk into healing and establishing new generational patterns.

But what was, what was, uh, sex like? What were the sexual patterns in history? Uh, how your, how, how did your parents relate to each other romantically? H, how, how, you know, how were they showing affection? Did they have healthy conversations about things regarding sex, relating to sex? So I get the Puerto Rican side. The Norwegian Scandinavian side is, um, a lot more things hidden. So if there's an issue. So, okay, so for in the Puerto Rican side, if, um, someone gets pregnant and they're not married, they just, culturally typically, they just celebrate the baby and kind of pretend like it's nothing and just keep going on with life. There's no sense of like sobriety. Very little sense of sobriety. You might get it in the legalistic churches and stuff like that. Um, but there's no sense of sobriety of what happened here. Hey, there needs to be some healing and working through it.

Uh, on the Scandinavians, I'm just telling you my generation, okay? People get offended when talking about cultures and things like that. I'm just talking about my journey. You can talk about yours. Is, um, Scandinavians are very, they don't, they don't talk about emotions. So there's, there's a disconnect in that. Don't share their feelings. So if there's problems, a lot of it is more hidden. And, "We got to put this away. We got to know because we want to make sure things look okay." Feelings, emotions, stuff like that. I don't know. Right? It was funny because I was talking at a Men's Conference and I joked about my Puerto Rican and Norwegian, uh, Scandinavian side and, um, how they're always competing against each other within me. It's fire and ice, you know, at war, constantly clashing. And one of the gentlemen after one of my sessions, he came to me and he goes, you know, he goes, "I'm all Norwegian." And he goes, "My grandmother, he goes, the only memory I have of my grandmother is when we would have gatherings, she would sit down in a rocking chair and she would just rock like this the whole day and she wouldn't say anything. Hardly anything. Ask, hi, hello. She'd just sit. And then at the end of the day, he goes, she'd stop rocking and she'd go, 'That was great. All right, see you later.'" He goes, "That's my relation to my grandmother." I said, "Not too far from mine."

So, generational, what, what, what was, what, what cultures do you come from? And what patterns, um, often stand out that now you're inheriting them? And you maybe grew up in it, you didn't see it, but you have some of those same, like, kind of leanings and same problems and same battles? We're on a journey, folks, of healing. That now shame will keep you from that, because it makes shame makes you one with your battles. Shame makes you one with your goofy feelings or emotions or sexual urges that comes through. "This is who you are. This came from you. You dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty." Right? And the enemy loves that because he's an accuser. And so we get lost in interpretation. This means, "Oh, if I had this thought, or I had a dream." People tell me, "I had a dream and it was a sex dream." The majority of sex dreams are just dreams of your longing for intimacy and connection. That's all it is. But we get lost. "Oh, it was sex. I know I had, you know, maybe I actually, maybe it wasn't." You know, we start hyperventilating. Do you notice all my little mannerisms that I do? They're not, they're not sober. We lose our sobriety because fear and shame have taken over.

So when my wife and I were talking to, um, our congregation, we'd share and we would talk about, we would talk about sex struggles and all that. I kind of look over and I go, "I feel like we're kind of talking like parents to them." And it dawned on me, this is what we're doing. We're engaging reparenting. No one's been parented in this stuff. I wasn't. And so I had to go figure it out. I had to go, "Okay, God." And but I started with learning. I started with getting shame out, learning what love is, to let the Father's love begin to heal those places. And learning to see my body. Some of you, it could help to just get reconnected to your body in a loving way. You know, there's exercises. Some people think it's goofy, whatever, but it could be helpful. You know, you talk about just giving yourself a hug. This feels weird. Feels okay. It feels more weird when you're at odds with yourself. I, I, I, I know that of just even, um, because your body feels. And I don't want this to sound like, you know, mystic woo-woo out there, but your body does come under the influence of your constant, uh, self-hating, condemning, beating yourself up relationship you have with yourself. It does. You don't think that over a period of time, like if, like if I'm talking to you and I, and just dating down like, "Stupid, you're just no good, you're just worthless," and I just kept you under the assault of that. Do you think over time that'd have an effect on your health? It sure would. But we allow that in ourselves to ourselves in how we relate to ourselves.

So, okay, what I'd like to lead you into, because I kind of laid an initial template. Now we're going to get kind of deeper into some of the wood and even to some of the swampy areas of subjects and the battlegrounds. I want to ask you some questions. And this could be stuff you can write down, you can journal, and you can process in your own life. Uh, have, and if you have discussion with a therapist or have discussion with someone you trust that talk to in this area. Um, let me ask you a very important question: What were the circumstances in which your sexual drive was formed, formed, began to open up, which is usually somewhere in puberty, right? Somewhere within those years. Remember where, you know, for, like, you know, I say from a guy standpoint, where boys were like, "Girls were yuck!" to then, um, the way that I explained it to Max, cuz I had to learn how to, like, I had to learn with Max and his being on the spectrum how to talk to him in ways. So it's, it's, you want to talk about a challenge? Certainly it's challenging for parents in communicating sex and talking about it with their kids. Try doing that when someone's on the spectrum. One of the things I would say is, "Max, like, where girls were yuck, gross, but then it turned into, 'Ooh la la!'" That was, and it worked. He got it. It clicked. I was like, "Thank you, God. Thank you." All right. All right. We'll keep going with this, right? Because I'm constantly in a way of like, "Okay, uh, saying that that didn't make sense. Okay, uh, I'm going to say it like this."

But when it initially happened, what's your earliest memory of an arousal, of attraction? I think this is a good exercise. Now, most people, arousal, attraction, or just sex in general, most people, it's some kind of disruptive, traumatic kind of experience. Finding your father's pornography stash, finding a relative's pornography stash, seeing a pornographic channel. I remember early on, I was in, I want to say third grade, and it was, like, pornographic kind of, like, cartoon kind of thing that was handed out around the room. And it's, it's traumatic. Traumatic because, um, I was going to talk about it from a man's perspective, but you know, we could all relate to this. It's a, it's a fearful moment. And it's like, "What was that that I just saw?" And then leads into, "What was that that I just saw?" Right? That's kind of the setup that these moments bring about. They're very, "Oh my goodness." You know, there were a number of times I had this happen where it was introduced to me, and it created like a legitimate panic attack, like anxiety, just as I'm a kid, right? These things haven't been talked about, haven't been, right? Like, I may have had, like, I have a crush on a girl, but it was never like, you know, "Whoa, there's been no discussion. Hey, this was happening in your body. Talk about it. It was make you feel how? Thought? None of that. None of that."

How, how did it start for you? Was it, uh, and this gets very challenging, was it traumatic being touched in an inappropriate way, a sexual encounter? And, um, that's how it starts. So our sex drive is birthed into brokenness. We're already creatures with sin in our generations and the iniquities of our families and a lot of the battlegrounds they had. And this is why shame is so dangerous for Christians, because it causes us to shove a lot of things into the closet or under the rug, whichever analogy fits. Um, and how you communicate it. So you may be replicating the exact same battleground your mom had. She never talked to you about it. You may be manifesting, actually, most and most likely too, whatever the most intense aspect of sexual struggle is, one or both of your parents had some kind of struggle with it. Just it compounds in generations. How do we heal? Well, we get past the shame. So our parents can look at us and go, "Hey, I understand that battle. I get it. Here's some, here's some things I've had to work through." And I've had, and now we're having healing conversations. But instead, our parents were so ashamed of their history that they didn't talk about it. So then when you were struggling, like, "What are you doing? Jesus isn't like that." They're shaming your struggles, they're shaming encounters that they're having with you that have been happening for a while, and they never talked to you about it. And now they're just like, "I doesn't like that." And that's not, that's not going to help somebody walk into healing.

Now, many people have lived in what they call Purity Culture. There are a lot of people online, they talk, you can see, you can look it up, and church Purity Culture. And a lot of it is talked about in a negative way. And there was a guy who wrote a book, his name was Joshua Harris. "I Kissed Dating Goodbye." It was a mindset. We're no, I'm no longer going to date. It's only going to be like, kind of courtship to marriage. I got to be honest, I was a youth pastor when that book came out. I made fun of it. I said, "I'm going to write a book called 'I Kiss Dating Goodbye Goodbye.'" That's just sarcastic, Mark. That's so, I, I didn't, I didn't really give much room to that. But, um, but there was a thing called Purity Culture where there was a lot of like, "We're going to wear a commitment ring. I'm going to keep myself pure. I'm not going to have sex till marriage." And then people got married, they're trying to have sex, and there's all kinds of problems. There's anxiety, there's struggles in connecting. They're having all these issues. So they were like, "Purity Culture was terrible." And I don't like to be black and white like that because it's not that Purity Culture was terrible. It was incomplete. Because again, it didn't go to the heart. We didn't teach people how to work with desire, how to work with passion, how to allow yourself to see attraction in those things and put it in its place to be mentored and coached and work through those things. The beauty that sex is and what it can be. And you're kind of left into, "Well, you're married. Okay, there you go." Which is true. When you get married, you leave father and mother. So Mom and Dad shouldn't be like, "Hey, how's it going?" And right? But there be, um, you be comfortable enough to work through with your spouse. But also, I do think there can be helpful equipping because most couples have some sort of sexual struggles in connecting with each other, let alone all the other battles of fantasy novels and, and pornography and temptations and inappropriate interactions, you know, all these kinds of things that we're struggling with.

Okay, so what are the circumstances around which your sex drive began to be engaged? How are you introduced to sex and attraction? Was it a trauma? Because a lot of times it is. Were you equipped? Here's another question: Were you equipped in how to manage your sex drive? Did Dad sit down? Mom sit down? Like, not just sit down, I shouldn't even say sit down because that involves like, "Okay, we're going to talk." But just in ongoing interaction about, again, this is something that affects everyone all the time and all their journey, and it should be something that's talked about on a regular basis. Um, what was, um, what was your father's example in how he, how he treated your mother? Did he show honor and respect? Did he show affection towards her? That he loved her? And in that, did the Father tell you who you are? The Father tell you who you are? Because if he doesn't, the Father of Lies is going to give you his recipe. So we're seeing that manifest now in culture in increasing measure in identity confusion. And to the point that there are things that I may say, could say in this broadcast that could buffer down the reach of this video. That's how much intense battle there is over gender identity that's going on. The wrestling match that's happening. Because, um, when a father establishes identity, that's, that's work. He helps to develop the emotional comp of his children so they understand who they are as God made them to be. And I saw this pretty early on in ministry of ministering to people that had struggles with sexual identity. I remember a conference I put together. I was talking about, "There's no male nor female." And this lady that was there, she came out to me. She was in a fury. And I didn't even know what was going on. I just saw her fussing in the back. And there's a lot of people take the way people take things when you teach scripture. I'm, I'm to this day blown away all the time at how people will interpret what I'm teaching. It's, it's one of the scarier parts of what I do because I go, "I, I did not even mean that the way that you took it." Anyways, I was talking about, "No, no male or female." I don't even remember where I was going. I was talking identity. She came up to me, she goes, "I'm so glad you said there's no male or female because I want to take these and I want to cut them off. I can't stand them." You could see the wrestling she had. And being a female, and it's like the absence of, there wasn't a father's voice anywhere in sight. So if you notice what goes along with the gender battle is also the hatred of father. You see it. It's been there for a while. There's such a wrestling mat, and it's just, it's satanic. It's his work. So he's wanting to do in the land. That's why I continue to teach, all solutions are healed by a father. United States needs a dad. UK needs a dad. Europe needs a dad. Asia needs a dad. In fact, I have people tell me, you know, that work in other countries, whether as missionaries or do teaching, where they go, "Man, our country needs what you're talking about." They live so far from even understanding what a father needs to be in the home. This all stands because a father establishes identity. And so we're talking about the spiritual confusion that's going on in, in, in gender and where we, how we see, you know, our sexuality.

Let's look back a little bit because what's been happening is the man has been attacked. And in every way, shape, and form. Some because of abuses and how the man lived his life. Some of it because the Father of Lies wants to just overthrow the family structure, right? And so there's this phenomenon that's taking place that's opened up for confusion. I'm going to explain to you what it is. We have pushed away for a variety of reasons, a father leading his home, husband and wife being one flesh, but the father, the husband leading under Christ, and there being that kind of order. And outside of that, it's now, cuz now that's switched because the man's become passive and he's in many ways become a responder. He's become emotionally more, if I could use this term, more beta in his responses and his ways for a variety of reasons, which has now put an extra burden on the wife. And she's now, so now we're used to women, mothers, wives initiating prayer, going to prayer meetings, taking the family to church, talking about the Bible, reading the Bible. She's doing it, and she's angry and she's resentful at him. She's so irritated because he's not initiating in the home. He's afraid to. He's afraid of her. He is afraid of her. He's afraid of failing because he's got no model. He's got no confidence. So he hides. And in the hiding, his addictions rise up because he's not out conquering, he's hiding. This is why David in the Bible got caught in a hook with Bathsheba. There's a variety of reasons that you actually, what I'm teaching is in David's life because David struggled with sexual sin. And it stems from the rejection of his father. His father rejected him, like he wasn't even there. Go back and read it. Okay? So that rejection followed him. So when it was time, it says, "When time the kings would go out and fight in war, David goes, I'm hanging back." So the rejection of his father and his passivity in being stepping out in war opened up sexual temptation. And those, that's the recipe for a man in sexual temptation: abandonment or neglect from a father, and then get you out of the battle, get you in passive mode.

Okay, so now the mom is leading things. Now spiritually, there's confusion in the home. So now there's no imprint in the household. So the children are now not being told who they are. So the Father of Lies, he'll care what you pick as long as it's not what God designed for you. I saw this early on, what broke my heart is that we were seeing the heart of the battle and starting to help people. And now being told you can't even do that. Like, you know, we're living in a country and countries where you could be shut down for even helping people with their sexual struggles. How we've even gotten to that place. So even when people write to me, there are people writing to me, and sometimes I see the email and I go, "Hmm, this is a trap." And I ask the person a question back. "You're like, do you deal with such and such? Do you deal with this?" And I ask them a question back, and I can see this is a trap trying to trap me into something to distract me to get me down this line. No, no. I love you, and there's no shame. But what God's ways is what I'm going to hold to. But we're going to get to the heart of your battleground. And then I saw in the home, in my youth ministry, the same sex attraction battleground. And you'd see, you'd see the trauma because trauma is a big part of this. It's like, if we're going to talk about trauma, why are we ignoring this in sexual attraction? Why are we ignoring it? The world talks about trauma everywhere. Trauma, this affects this pathology everywhere except for this when it comes to same-sex attraction or even, you know, hyper-elevated sex drive or confusion. But I would see it in my youth pastoring where that father role wasn't there. So either both father roles not there, or trauma is a major, major part of it. Now, I know we live in a society where we're, we're, we're in a bowl of soup of chemicals and toxicity. Men's estrogen levels increasing, testosterone's dropping. There's all kinds of things we could also get into societally that are contributing to this. And what's happening in women's pregnancies, what's affecting them chemically. We're living in a synthetic chemical-infused world. So there's a lot, lot, lot of factors going into this. Don't write to me, "What about this? What about that?" I'm just laying out for you. I'm in the trenches of this. So if you have a different viewpoint, then go help people with that viewpoint. I think we waste a lot of time arguing and stuff like that. I'm just telling you what I'm, what I'm in the trenches of. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. I'm moving now. I'm thousands of one-on-one work with people.

Okay, so this isn't like just something I made up because I read a newspaper article. But this is, this is an important thing because the out of the home affects everything. That's why I go back to the home for your healing journey. Because God will reboot, reparent, recalibrate what has been stolen. He will be your father. He's the father to the fatherless. But the Father of Lies is always wanting to step into this. That was funny when Jesus said, "You think your father's Abraham, but your father's the devil." They were like, "Come Sunday teaching on your father the devil."

So, were you equipped on how to relate to the opposite sex? I talk a lot with Abby and Max about how to be a brother, how to be a sister. How do you relate so that you can love your neighbor as yourself? So that you're comfortable in just learning to interact with people in wholesome ways. And it seems that everything is so charged to go into sexual directions. We've been overtaken by that as the dominant. We're a dopamine lust-infused culture. The Bible talks about lust. Can we talk about that for a little bit? But this word gets confusing. Can I balance you out a little bit on it? Can I ground you a little bit on it? I'll talk about this, and then I'm going to take a break to have a sip of water, take a dance break, maybe stand up for a second, stretch my legs, because I'm going to, I'm going to go for a bit here and take you all on a journey. Um, I was at this scripture in Romans, but let me go back to the one that's typically thought about when it comes to lust. I'm in the New King James. I use the New King James. It's kind of the, you know, I'm not a King James only. I get some of their arguments, but there's a lot of flaws in it. But I like New King James. Seems to be the best that works for me in teaching right now. But I don't get into those translation fights. Then when desire, the original King James translates this lust. This word, I'm putting it up on the screen. Let me get off of this. Dishonoring. So you can focus. This word is tricky. And that's why a lot of things and topics have nuance that we need to look at, need to discover, we need to learn. Because this word that's translated lust in many of the King James translations also means like regular desire. This word here, the Catholics use this a lot, concupiscence. I don't know. I feel like I said a bad word when I just said that. Speaking specifically of sexual desire that is forbidden. It also means desire to lust after. Okay, the main negative meaning of this word is desire for what's forbidden. So clear things God says. So if you're married, you don't desire another person, another person's wife. You desire your wife. Your desire shall be for her. If you're the wife, your desire shall be for him. That's good. Feed that. Feed that. Let's feed that. See, we weren't taught that. How to direct passion? Because all of you have passion. No, I don't have any passion. Yes, you do. Let me get this a little bit smaller here. It's like, okay, yeah. All of you have passion. Again, the father helps instill passion by the way he notices it, calls it out, encourages it. Okay, passion and desire. It's a great thing. We never talk about good desire. John Eldridge wrote a book on the Journey of Desire. Appreciate that because he was calling out and bringing out, "Hey, when we think of desire, we always go bad." "I want this." "Oh, it's bad." "I want this." It's because it's an idol. "I want this." You haven't surrendered it. We do a lot of goofy things to just simple because there is actually such a thing as good desire.

Now, let me go back to this. Where am I? Desire has conceived. Okay. So, desire for what is forbidden is the negative. But then there's also simple desire. So it does seem like the majority of when it's used, it's bringing about what we could call lust. But then there's many uses where it's actual desire. So lust is an intruder to hijack desire. That's great. You are meant to desire and enjoy, and it's okay. I don't think Christians have been really good at appreciating desire. It's like, "Oh, I love to work on cars." That's an idol. You, it's not of God. You got to surrender that. We got to crush that thing. We're obsessed with idolatry. We're obsessed with trying to prevent idolatry, and we've become religiously goofy in not allowing desire for good things. You have a good meal. You enjoy company. You enjoy a hobby. You enjoy an activity. You enjoy your work. You enjoy certain friendships. You enjoy certain connections. Lust often takes over because we're not cultivating healthy desire. Your sexual temptations amplify because you're lonely and you're not connecting to just a desire to be with somebody in a meaningful way that doesn't have to be sexual. You understand what I'm saying? We get hijacked and overtaken by lust.

So let's look at this word for a little bit. And I got it. Yeah. Oh, cool. It's up on the screen here. So in, in, I use, if those of you asking, I use Bible Bible by Olive Tree. It's not at the top there, but it's that's what it's called. This is the app I use. It's just simple. It makes doing these things simple. So this is the Greek word that's used. Desire here in some translations, lust. So you see here, "the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches." This is in Mark 4:19. "And the desires for other things entering in choke the word and it becomes unfruitful." Right? So you're taking in the word of God, the seed of the word of God, but you're, you're, you're so consumed with everything else, you can't even hear what's being taken. So it chokes it out, becomes unfruitful. Then, look at this, though, in Luke 22:15. Can you see that? It's kind of tiny. I mean, I might need a new prescription, but it looks, looks tiny to me. But you can at least see the reference. "If, if, if the type is small, bear with me." "This is Jesus with fervent desire." "I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer." Jesus is about to get beaten, get tortured, get crucified, take on the sins of the world. And he goes, "Man, I just want to be with my brothers here." "Oh, you want that more than God?" It's what people would say today. No, it's great to look forward to a gathering, to a connection, to love, relationship, because God is revealed and shown in relationship. So this is healthy desire. And many of our lust desires towards things that are forbidden get born out of actual healthy desires not being cultivated. Are you following me? Are you catching this? Even in where where battles go into same-sex attraction, whether it's a battleground that you actually have that you're attracted, or people that have intrusive thoughts. They're around a guy, a guy's around a guy, and he's with him and he has an intrusive thought. "Oh my goodness, maybe a thought of having a sexual act with him." "Oh, I got to get away from him. I got to." In either battleground, whether it's an actual temptation or it's an intrusive thought, whatever it is, have you cultivated healthy desire of just learning how to a man bonding with another man? Can I just be honest with you? We have no references for that of a guy just really loving another guy. And that's it. It's not sexual. Doesn't have to be weird. Be any of that. What David and Jonathan? Yeah, yeah. David and Jonathan. Yeah, sometimes my mind goes, "Wait, what?" Know that expression that David and Jonathan had? I remember when I was in high school and I was reading Shakespeare. And forgive me what I'm going to share with you. It's just high school brain, okay? So, you know, for if you're going to get offended, okay. I remember in high school, we're reading Shakespeare and we're reading through him, and me and my friends, we were like, "Dude, he's writing to a guy." And they're joking around like, "Hey, he must be gay." Teenage 1980s, 90s brain, okay? So relax. There's no reference for a man expressing that meaningful, loving heart towards another man. So no wonder more and more men can feel so uncomfortable in sharing feelings because their only reference for feelings is either anger or "I want to sleep with you." Right? Their emotional spectrum hasn't been developed. So they don't know how to go, "Man, I'd love this guy like a brother." Now, in the military, they'll learn that. The band of brothers, there's a tightness that's together. You may see this a bit in firefighters or policemen. You see this in gangs. It becomes this like, "We're tight. We're loyal to each other." And through thick and thin. That's what Jesus had and cultivated with the disciples. Now, okay, I'm using a lot of male illustrations. They, the same in females because I have just as many females who, "Oh, I had a, I had a sexual thought about this lady I was talking to." And I was like, "Did you have a great conversation?" "Yeah, it was so meaningful. I felt connected, heard, and seen." Right? Because there's no reference of where to put that. We don't have a reference of where to put that emotion because we've lacked it so much in our lives. We are so lonely, so isolated. And 2020 pushed it over the ledge because everyone had to be in their homes or be away from each other and be remote. Was terrible for our emotions. It was terrible for our immune systems. And then the government goes, "Oh, it's so sad that the suicide rates are increasing. We need to have suicide prevention." Just, we just keep ignoring, ignoring, ignoring stuff that people are going through. So we don't, we don't have references for how to like a sister to a sister. We have reference for just brother to brother meaningful ways. And then we live in a world where it's like, "Oh, you had that thought? Maybe you need to explore that." Explore that rather than establishing people in love, not in shame, in love. I'm pretty lonely here in this area. I'm pretty lonely because I believe in what's true, what the word of God says about sex, about identity, about marriage. But I don't condemn. So now I'm separated from most so-called Christians and preachers. And I don't shame people, but I'll get into the why. And I won't just go, "Oh, just pray more and just get a web filter. You don't love God enough. That's why you need the fear of God in you more." That's what's going on. Yeah, keep saying that. And tell me how many people really get set free. I want to lead people into freedom.

So, when you're when you're down, you look for a rush. Do you know how to cultivate just good desire? Because most people you talk to, "What do you like doing?" "I don't know." "What do you enjoy?" "I don't know." "Well, I like drawing, but I feel like God's telling me I have to give up drawing because it gets in the way of my relationship with God." Who told you that? "I don't know. It's just my thought." I think God's telling me that we got some work to do here because desire is, desire is a remedy to depression. Because a lot of depression gets fueled by a lack of living according to cultivating healthy desire. You live a life pleasing everyone. You live a life striving in stress. You, and I lived my life doing church stuff, never cultivating who Mark is as a person. So when depression showed up, one of the big signals was, "I don't know what I like to do." So a major part of my healing in God was scriptural. I'll give you the scripture. "Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when desire is conceived, it is a tree of life." Somebody told me last week, they said, "You know what? When we watch what you do, you're having a lot of fun." I am. I am. I like this. I enjoy this. In fact, I want to do more and more of this in the future. That's my desire. Just more and more of this teaching, sharing, instructing, putting together books, just more and more. I love it. I don't wake up and go, "Now, some days I get too hard on myself, put too much pressure on myself, get stressed out over saying things the right way." Yeah, I love doing this. It took me a long time to get here, though. Took me a long time. And so living in what you enjoy, and enjoying relationship, and discovering enjoyment, which then also can lead to the joy connection that many are lacking, helps feed what your heart is longing for. Does it solve lust? No, it's multifaceted. But it begins to help fill your heart with what lust is trying to hook on to. Because lust is trying to hook on the absence of love. That's what it's doing to pull you into addiction. And in many ways, we are drawn away by our addictions. Right?

So here's your daddy. Another use of this word. "You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do." So this is where all those things come from, all those sexual desires outside of how God established it, is from your, your evil stepdaddy. You just got to change daddies. That's all. Start changing daddies. Start learning what it means to be loved by your Father in Heaven. Start dealing with the rejection wound. Because sexual struggles all go back to a rejection wound, abandonment, neglect, and your response to pain. That's why that's one of the early resources that I wrote on because it's foundational to everything. Rejection mindset. Without a connection to the love of the Father, we get lost. And so, "He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. When he speaks, he speaks lies." I'll finish it. He's the Father of Lies. Is where he goes with it.

Okay, then there's the word, "the lust of their hearts to dishonor their bodies." I brought that point out of where, where lust takes. "Here, here again, do not present your members as instruments of unrighteousness to sin, but present yourselves to God as a being." So Paul even said, "Present your bodies as a living sacrifice." Does he mean, you know, light your body on fire? No, that's not what he means. But it's, "I'm in connection with my body. Thank you, God, for making this, this mud bucket, this beautiful temporary mobile home, this housing of the Holy Spirit. Awesome. Thank you for this." Uh-uh. That's not. We battle over this. We fuss over this. We get plastic surgery. We get, you know, whatever. Not, I'm not condemning you if you get plastic surgery. Just just saying. You know, because we're in conflict with ourselves. When you're in conflict with yourselves, honoring your body. Because that's, isn't that really what happens? You respect your body. You respect the temple. And that shifts. Now the decisions you made. It's translated here, covetousness. And Romans 7, "Sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire." So that's Paul's battle that he talked about in Romans 7. But "put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill its lust." Let me pull that verse up because it's, he's talking about all kinds of intense stuff going on. Revry, that's not really a word used nowadays, but it speaks, um, this is, listen to this, a "netal and riotous procession of half-drunken and frolicsome fellows who after supper parade through the streets with torches and music in honor of a deity and sing and play before houses of male and female friends." Hence, you know, super clubbing and partying. Less and lust, not in strife and in envy. Those are all the intense battlegrounds going on both in the world. And that he's saying, "We're out of this. We got to leave that stuff." Um, and so put on the Lord Jesus Christ, make no provision for those lust. Okay, so there's that context that's being used. Galatians called lust of the flesh. "Those who are Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires." The flesh, if you want to summarize it, is really the old you. The flesh is multifaceted and its meaning. Okay, you put off, put off. So you see, like I said, there's a lot of negative uses for it because there's so many aspects of where desire has been hijacked.

Let me see here. Fleet also used for lust. "Led away by various lusts, but according to their own desire, worldly lust, foolish, disobedient, various lust." He tempted, was drawn away by his own lust. "Desires conceived, former lust." You see this? There's there's a lot here. The apostles are having to address swelling words for Lou. Now, hold on a second. Excuse my scrolling. You see Paul in here. "But we, brethren, have been taken away from you for a short time in presence, not in heart." This is 1 Thessalonians 2:17. "Endeavored more eagerly to see your face with great desire." Relationship desire. This is good. And you see this is what lust is after. Okay. So, um, I'm going to move on to another section of this journey, but I'm going to take a brief, brief break. Which one do I want to use? Maybe this one.

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I'm just taking a moment to check out your comments here before I get back.

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There's some good stuff going on here. Really good stuff. Really, really good stuff. Um, on top of, uh, people talking about gaming and stuff like that too. Um, I think that, uh, I was, there was a comment, uh, someone said Joshua Harris made him OCD, you know, too. And Joshua Harris then like renounced his faith in his journey. You can always tell to the soundness of teaching. Like, does it last to produce lasting fruit? I want to teach stuff that's going to last for my life. And he, he was definitely hitting people with stuff that made the most, infused legalism. And then what happens is many people are reacting to legalism and just throwing everything out altogether or becoming what's called progressive Christian, which, you know. And instead of going, "Oh, we need a grace perspective to now actually work on what people are struggling with and get to the heart of what they struggle with." Because legalism doesn't work. We just went, "Okay, all these patterns that the Bible calls sin, we're just going to say that it's okay." It's like, "Whoa, that's talk about extreme." And, uh, that's creating, creating all kinds of deception in people. And, um, but somebody wrote here, "Statement that's a great summary of growing up with sexual trauma." Because a lot, a lot of us have been sexually traumatized in some form or fashion. And a lot of it comes into even how we were introduced to it. I lost it, but it was a comment about, "I've been healing from sexual trauma for like eight years or something like that." And something to that effect. Oh, here it is. "Great video. I've been on an eight-year journey of healing sexual trauma. I feel like I'm finally at the point of accepting myself, connecting to my body, and learning who God is. God is as a father." Eight years. And people go, "Eight."

Years it takes as long as it takes. You're on a journey. In fact, we'll be spending our whole life learning to delve deeper in the Father's Love For Us. So, um, yeah. So let me get back to, uh, uh, kind of winding in the journey. Some of it I have written on, on, on my screen here, but a lot of it is kind of like a, this is like the, the Mark De Jesus flavor. Like I have a picture of a road, and I have these, these posts, and they're signs, and they just like little words of reminder. I think that's how God works with me and how I, I communicate things.

Um, but let's talk about porn. Because this is a, this is a, I'll say it this way, I've gotten to the point where when I'm dealing with people, teaching people, it's more like, who isn't struggling with porn than who is. When it comes to people on working with and dealing with it, it's everywhere. Um, you wouldn't, you wouldn't know that just looking at the church, but it's there. It's there, and it's pretty, it's pretty intense. Um, and many of them are in pulpits and they're condemning everybody while they're while they're battling it. It's, it's what Paul said. He said, you judge other people and you practice the same stuff. It's like, man, shouldn't we at least be humbled? Like, if you're battling and wrestling with that and you're at the pulpit body slamming everyone. Oh, yeah, it gets the Puerto Rican side worked up.

Um, but in, in, in pornography addiction, because it's, it's, it's highly addictive and it pulls people in. And the foundation I set already is what sets the template for falling into pornography struggles and battles with it. We see this historically. I don't, I think I don't think people see this as much anymore, but historically we've seen this as primarily a man battleground. Because maybe 30 years ago, that's pretty much how you would hear it. Every now and then, well, guy, and back then it was magazines. Nowadays, it's, it's, it's the accessibility of it. I really have compassion on people in their battles and their journeys.

Um, now, I, I had, I began to work on rejection issues and root issues. The internet was out, and I was working on these areas of lust and letting God heal these areas. Um, and what I call my renovation in 2004, '05, and '06. Um, but then as you see technology happening where the accessibility in smartphones and tablets and everywhere, and the advertisement, it's just everything's increasing. Everything's so sexually charged, and it's even difficult to watch shows where it's like, whoa, okay, okay, where was this going? Was this, I didn't know this was going to be here. Social media everywhere.

So this feeds into what I'm saying though, is that we've got to work on the heart issues, otherwise we're going to have to live in like cubicles, um, and, and, and, and not know how to relate to this battleground effectively. But it was traditionally seen as a man issue, but I'm seeing it, I'm seeing it at epic levels with females. Um, and in my work today, it's equal, 50/50. If I was, if I was take everyone I've talked to in the past five years, 50% men, 50% women. So it's, it's not, it's not one or the other now.

This is my opinion. This is, this is just anecdotal. This isn't based on any of my research, but I think there's something to it. Because historically, women were getting pulled into the romance novels. And I saw something interesting happen. I'm just going to throw this out there. I may regret sharing it this way, 'cause I don't know how much people can handle the behind-the-scenes stuff that I share. You know, when I, when I, when I drop things that are going on that you observe in patterns, and you know, you don't wonder if they can handle it. But, um, I noticed that there was this trend of, uh, in America, there's a trend of witchcraft, occult like stuff that's being brought from the back burner, behind the scenes, out into the front, to the forefront.

And the way that the devil brings things culturally into society is he's got to use entertainment, and he's got to use comedy. He's got to make it funny. If he makes it funny, it lightens it, and then it becomes commonplace. Uh, you know, so for like, for like, um, for like LGBT, um, kind of mindset, gay, lesbian, they tried it with Ellen, and didn't work. Got a lot of, you know, that TV show Ellen got a lot of, um, kickback about it, protest over it. But then they came out with Will and Grace, and it was funnier, and, and then it got infused more and more and more and more, more and more. We've come used now, you know, you see everywhere.

But there's another pathway that gets used, and it's, it's the rise of of a cult, uh, fascination with a cult. And so I'm going to kind of take a couple paths here. You have to kind of hang in here with me when I'm, when I'm sharing this. Is, I, I noticed in my pastoring work, Twilight was coming out, and there's like these kind of these occult overtones going out. And Harry Potter was coming out. And, um, I, I noticed a lot of people, when they, Christians online, when they talk about Harry Potter, they talk about, my parents didn't let me watch Harry Potter, and, and now, you know, I loosened up about it. And, um, and we throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Bible is pretty clear about over, like witchcraft, Old and New Testament. And Harry Potter's pretty straightforward witchcraft. It's not like, um, but they, they did it in a fantastic way of presenting it in a way that's appealing and a great story. And there's this phenomenon going on of people devouring Harry Potter books, like devouring it. Like people who can't, who, who can't read one page and pay attention are reading entire novels this thick, right? You don't think that's something going on here?

Now, don't get into legalism on me. I've been to Universal Studios. I walked through the Harry Potter Village, okay? So chill out. But I'm talking about what we're taking in, what we're saying is okay. Um, even as I walk through, I'm like, let's go to the next one, right? There is, um, there is, okay, so where am I going with this? And then, and then Twilight was coming out, and I saw a lot of the sisters, sisters in Christ, getting hooked into Twilight. Why? Because there's man pursuing strong man, and, and this battle that's going to take place. There's like kind of these occult themes that are infused in it. And I, and I was, and I was saying, I kind of felt like Willy Wonka in the Chocolate Factory when the kid is wanting to jump into the chocolate, and he's like, no, don't, don't do it, don't go. And the kid just jumping in the chocolate anyways. Kind of felt like it. It's like, it's not the best thing. I wouldn't, I wouldn't do it. I don't want to be legalistic, but it's just not great.

Um, and then, then we see more and more movies coming out. And, you know, move into 50 Shades of Grey and things like that. Okay. Why am I bringing this up? Because anywhere you see, uh, witchcraft, sorcery of any kind, you usually see sexual sin right there with it. It's a very strange phenomenon, but you see it all throughout the Bible, Old and New Testament. You see, even in, uh, Jezebel, because Jezebel is, is, um, is witchcraft, relational witchcraft personified. Okay? There's false worship and all that, but it's relational witchcraft. Both Old and New Testament, Jezebel, they have, they have parallels. And you even see Jesus rebuking. She's, she's false teaching. Like this is in church. And as a kid reading this, I'm like, this is happening in church. Then I saw it in church, and I was like, oh, snap, this is happening more places than people realize.

But where I would notice it, where there was relational manipulation, like 'cause that's what really witchcraft is, is, um, it's, it's relational manipulation. We try to manipulate, um, the spiritual to try to make things happen. That's, you know, the, the, the standard idea of a sorcerer stewing a brew and, and goo, and, and, you know, that kind of thing, trying to conjure up something. We're manipulating something into happening, right? It's part of it. Manipulating, controlling, um, and then there's a, there's a, the misdirection. When there's a lot of that in society now, I got to teach you this without making you hyperventilate. Oh my goodness, I walked by Harry Potter, I got slimed. No, that's fear of evil. Oh, maybe I saw a Harry Potter commercial. Stop being superstitious. Or, um, as Michael Scott would say, even a little stitious. Stop it, stop it. The, the Church of Ephesus lived in the epitome of witchcraft, and they weren't hyperventilating. Oh, there's a demon over there. Oh, there's. They just walked through with confidence, and they're like, we don't have to be of what they're participating, but we can relate, we can connect, we can talk, we can have a relationship, right? Don't hyperventilate. If I go to your house and I see a Harry Potter book on the shelf, I'm not going to scream at you, okay? I'm just telling you how this stuff works.

So, for example, if I, I've been in a church where there's spiritual abuse taking place. Say, when I say spiritual abuse, it's cult-like, cult-like at that level. I go, where's the sex? Where's the sex? We're talking about Mark, uh, who's having, uh, who's having promiscuous sex? 'Cause why? Oh, because that that comes along, comes along. So somebody, somebody's having sex. No, no, no one's okay. All right, maybe it's just me. Maybe it's just me. Then comes later out, yeah, there was an affair going on in this thing, and this was happening. Oh, okay. Is it just Jezebel was false teaching, and she had her, she had her people, and she was teaching them to all sleep with each other? It's just part of the matrix of it. So that's, that's you see it. And, ah, people can't handle Mark. People can't handle the deeper dive. That's how, that's why, you know, when they talk about sex trafficking and things like that, it of often goes in line with occult kind of behaviors that are going on behind the scenes too. People say, you're crazy for thinking that. Yeah, sure. Tell me I'm crazy for what I've seen, because I've, I've seen it, and it's awful.

So my point, my point, my point being is that I saw there being a pathway of the women's hearts being pulled in by the strong men, because their men weren't strong in their life. Their dads were beta and passive. When they see this guy who's, who's ripped, this Chris Hemsworth kind of person, I know I'm indifferent. I'm in Mark. That's Thor. That's not Twilight, okay? As Guardians, okay, I'm in Thor now, all right? And I've seen Marvel movies, right? I have. You know, I, I, I, I balance it out. I, I try to be reasonable about this, okay? You just got to understand. You got to be awake. Got to be sober.

'Cause women were seeing these strong men with pursuit, and it's not that a woman is like, oh, I love the, the, the six-pack. Now, they may say, I love his pecs and his arms. No, they love the strength that his broad shoulders communicate. They love that he's not only protecting, as guardians, but he's, he shows initiation, he shows confidence, he shows strength. When everyone's weak, he shows up to the battle. And superheroes, when they show up to the battle, there's almost a comic, a comical approach. They have. They make jokes. That's why people like the Marvel movies, because, and they're done so well, where they step up and, and they, um, they're sorting and, and fighting and they're kind of making jokes to each other. It's like, almost like they don't realize the intensity of what's happening, 'cause they're so used to living in battle. It's amazing. It's like in the movie The Gladiator, there's this scene Maximus is fighting, and he turns, and one of his own guys is about to stab him, and they look at each other, and they laugh. They go, they're like, almost like, we almost killed each other. They're just used to living in battle.

And women today are longing for men that are strong, and that want to fight for them, and, and fight for their home, and not be beta, not be passive, be engaged. So they see a man that shows that strength, and something flutters inside of them. And we say, well, it's 'cause he got big pecs. And I don't have the pecs like that. No, no, no, no. It's not the pythons. It's not, it's not that. Although it's nice for a man, because that shows that he takes care of his temple, and he improves himself, and he, and he works on his physical stature, right? So this is the twisted combination of witchcraft and sex that the enemy infuses.

Now, if you have sexual temptations, doesn't mean you have a spirit of witchcraft. No, I'm just saying, just be aware. Can we, can I talk about this without you being legalistic? You going into legalism, and I just got to let that go, because I, I got to let that go, because I always, sometimes I, I get too paranoid at how people are going to, are people going to take it.

So pornography, as the access to it increases, here are my biggest concerns about pornography. And these are probably concerns you may have heard or may have not heard. Number one is that it conditions you to not know what the true beauty of sex is, and what it could be, what it looks like, because it's a false representation. Also, porn is an escape. It's just an escape. You're going to another place that doesn't exist, that's not real. Despite what Zuckerberg says about meta, it's just not real. It's not real. It's an escape. Okay? And porn conditions us for a reference of sexual enjoyment that's not realistic. It increases fantasy, disconnection, and the stimulation of watching sex and not participating in it. So I'm going to go even further. Standards of attraction that are not realistic. Thus increasing plastic surgery standards. And now women are beating themselves up like crazy. Um, and, and, and, and men are trying to go to the gym and trying to get every TRT treatment and every, uh, hormone enhancing thing or steroids or whatever to look a certain way, right?

Here's the biggest thing that is, is concerning. Pornography will make you relationally lazy. Pornography will make you relationally lazy. Because sex, as God designed it, is in marriage. And you have two people who process sex pretty differently. You have a man who, first of all, sex is a place of intimacy, but he was made to be a conqueror, to be one who's an overcomer, a leader, a man of adventure, a man of pursuit. But sex for him connects him, and it's an expression and connection of intimacy. In a woman's heart, there's a pathway of emotions, safety, comfortability, romance, being pursued, that leads to sex, intercourse, to intimacy, to foreplay, all those things. So the man has to learn how to relate emotionally to lead towards greater union and expression. And the wife has to realize to be open to being pursued. Because just as the man has his battles to pursue, ladies, you have your battle of not receiving love. So love could show up, and three dozen roses flying in the air, in the most beautiful song played, and everything presented perfectly. But the self-hatred that's there and shame will kick back and push back and not receive what's available.

So God sets two people up to learn how to love in ways that don't go with their default setting. Because women want men to love them the way they want to be loved, and men want to be right. And instead, God goes, you need to learn how the other person connects to these ways. And I'm going to teach you how to stretch your relational capacity by learning how to relate, ladies, to your husband, husband to your wife. But most, most marriages today are in roommate syndrome. Because we haven't learned how to stretch these muscles, to stretch and to move beyond our comfort zones. We move into a comfort place, and we might as well live like, um, like Lucy and Desi Arnaz, you know, in the mov, in the TV shows where they slept in separate beds. I, it's just, you, now they did that for TV. Um, might as well do that. We're just, we're just in a roommate syndrome. We just fallen into that roommate process because there's no more stretching anymore. You get dulled by the busyness of life. We're not tending to our emotional life. We're not pausing and breathing. We're not sitting as couples and just looking into each other's eyes and just talking, how are you doing? I'm going to listen. We're distracted on our phones. We're distracted with kids. Oh, while I'm on my phone, hey, there's a hot girl. Oh, I can go there now because here I got to work for it.

And for many men, they're afraid. She knows me. She knows my battles. I'm scared to initiate because then she'll reject me. And then men get rejected. The wife says, I'm not in the mood. He doesn't know how to handle that. There's no, no reference in the manual for this. Well, the manual doesn't even exist. How do I deal with if she's not in the mood? Right? And God goes, I'm going to teach you patience. I'm going to teach you how to hang in there. I'm going to teach you how to communicate through. I'm going teach you how to hang in there with each other and learn and grow. I have learned more in my life about how to follow Christ by learning how to love my wife more than anything else, said. But I've had to drive the beta stuff out of me, 'cause it is, it is so generational and so, uh, it's, it's, it's like a tranquilizer dart. It just, I'm too tired. I can't deal with this. Another problem. Another thing you need help with. Uh, this is, this is all the enemy has to do. Take one dart, put it in a sniper rifle. This is it. And just hit the man, put him to sleep. Sleep. And that'll trickle down to his wife, trickle down to his kids. You have generations. That's why I've said this for years. All the devil needs is one tranquilizer dart. It's not really that complicated. Oh, there's a devil here. There's a devil there. Let's get deliverance of the 99 demons we have. It's just, it's just one shot. Hit the man's heart, knock him out.

You wake up the man, and he humbles himself before his family, who repents and says, I got to wake up. I, what I do and what I say matters here. And I'm going to invest my heart and invest my affection and invest my thoughts towards loving my wife. Because what you feed grows. The problem is, is in his passivity, he's out of the game. He's not an adventure. He's in a cubicle. Nothing against cubicles. I'm talking about just like, like where it's just a sterile. He doesn't have adventure to go conquer. And the phone tells him, oh, she looks excited to look at you. And it's a counterfeit. So it conditions us to be relationally lazy. In work, marriage takes work. It's good work. It's the best work for your life. I love marriage. I, I, I, I love marriage. I get really worked up at the war over marriage. Before this even same-sex marriage argument came to place, I was already flustered because of the battles going on in marriages. A couple's just living roommate. But we're like, bless God, there he's an elder. Bless God, they have a good ministry. Boy, they do a lot of evangelism work. They help the poor. Oh, we're so impressed with all those things. Oh, it's so [Laughter] nice.

So I, I years ago, I did a men's group in my church. I, I just want to get with the guys and I said, let's just, we just, we would sit down and I just met them where they're at. And I just say, you know, tell me what, what brings, what makes you come to life? And most of the things they were sharing were not things they were actually doing. And then it was interesting. I said, uh, we're going to do something different each time. And, uh, one time I said, we're going to go on a hike. We're going to take a hike together. I gave them an assignment. And I noticed the attendance dropped. Guys were calling out. And then I kicked it up. And not to say, hey guys, we're going to go play paintball together. Bunch of guys dropped out. I knew they were afraid. They hadn't done it. They worked at cubicles at desks. Nothing wrong with, I work at a desk all day, okay? So that's, if you, that's not the point. I, I want to take you out. And every guy we did paintball, every guy that went that day, they go, man, I need this. I needed this. And we're like, you know, if you don't understand you guys playing your stupid games, why do you think guys love sitting down and watching football all Sunday and Monday night and Sunday night or Saturday? Why think they love it? Because they're connecting to some, something in it that they want to be in, and they want in their own life. They want the sense of of winning the battle. Football is such a picture of the battle of titans of people. And they, and they look at the stats, and they look at, because their adventurer needs to be fed. And because the testosterone level in men is low, the, the, the confidence in men is low, and they've not been stretched, and they've not been encouraged, and they've been discouraged, and there's no fathering.

And I learned that we're not going to fix any of this by yelling at the men and lecturing them. So I gave up. I tried that. I tried that for a while, and then I started losing my peace and getting angry. And I said, okay, that's not going to produce the righteousness of God. The wrath of man doesn't produce that. All right, back to the drawing board. I just pray for their hearts, and I just keep speaking, keep teaching, let the Holy Spirit work. Because pornography is an intimacy issue, and men have not been trained in how to cultivate healthy intimacy. They weren't trained in it.

Hey Mark, why don't you talk about the women? Because if I equip the men, it's a game changer. Game changer. 'Cause I'll change your whole home. Your kids will be equipped. You equip. The problem is, when I talk about this stuff, it brings up all the anger in wives. You're like, that son of a [Laughter]. Now you have to understand, marriage, uh, marriage doesn't take porn battles away. So there's many singles out there going, what do we do? A single, right? And we think, if I had a relationship, it'd be better. No, marriage does not solve at all sexual struggles you have. It doesn't. You may think it does. Nope, nope.

Now, the pathway of, of pornography leads to inevitably leads to masturbation. That's pretty much most of the time where it goes. So what happens is with masturbation, I'll, I'll talk about masturbation a little bit because it's controversial. It's very controversial. I'm going to try to navigate it 'cause I, I prefer not to just give blanket statements. I prefer to, to talk in one-on-one settings. I do that a lot in helping people with that issue. But let me, before I get to that, pornography viewing, then masturbation, then what happens? Absolute debilitating shame, guilt. Uh, it's not even remorse. It's like, like shame attack, panic attack kind of thing happens. Right? Now, many LCDs go into like some kind of guilt confession. They feel like they got to confess it, get it out, and confess it to people. Um, but we often what we do is we panic react, right? We go, I, I need, I need a filter. I need, I need, I need to get help. We search online. I, we, we react in panic. We don't react soberly.

And when I teach people about dealing with sin struggles in their life, I teach people about reacting soberly. Right? You, your anger, you lash out, and it does some damage to people. We start painting up, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, so sorry. That's panic attack reaction. That's not sober. Sober sees, okay, I'm dishonoring my body. Sober sees what's going on. What's going on in my life that I need to be aware of that's feeding this? No, what we want is we want the feelings to go away. The yucky feelings to go away. Because we, we hurry, rush, get involved in ministry or church or business. I just, I got to get busy. I got to forget about this. We hide the feelings. And what we don't do is we lose sobriety, and we don't see what's going on. And, and so what I want to encourage you in your battleground, God's leading you on a journey of healing. And so the porn, masturbation pattern that you live in needs to be met with sobriety. Because I want to live sober. And there's a guiding, there's a guiding thing in my life in living sober. You know what the guiding thing is in my life? I value my body. Value who I am. But even more so, there's a sobriety of, I never want to, as a way of my lifestyle, put pain in the eyes of my wife. I'm sober to that. Not panic attack sober. Because my life influences her life. And I recognize my life matters. I am a leader and priest in my home. I'm responsible for safety in our household. And so I choose to live in self-love. And I believe a man who loves his wife loves himself. And I, I believe a man who doesn't love his wife, uh, needs to realign himself of how he sees himself. And recognizing you're one with your wife.

So I want to move and cultivate. Now, that's not legalism and condemnation. We're on a journey. We're growing in our journey. But we all have to sober up. 'Cause porn is stealing our sobriety. Just as a, a alcoholic getting drunk is not sober about his or her emotions. You lose it. And that's why the instruction is, be not drunk with wine, but be filled with the spirit. And again, that's another subject. I've talked about that about alcohol. The command is not getting drunk. And I know that's a very sensitive subject. And, and I respect that, because there's a lot of people battling and struggling. I'm, I'm very sensitive over that, and I try to maintain that. But the, the command is, don't get drunk. But how many things do we get drunk on that disconnect us from going, hey, you're empty, you're depressed, you got trauma, going out. We're just, we're unaware, we're ill-equipped. Right? So practicing sobriety goes, I feel this. I'm not going to escape. I need to see this. I need to see this for what it is.

Now, let me talk about masturbation for a little bit, because it would be helpful for a lot of you to understand. Let masturbation is not necessarily a lust issue, as much as it is, it's an anxiety issue. It's a stress issue. Goes back to childhood. It has a lot to do with how you process emotions. And emotions get pent up, pent up, pent up, pent up. What's happening? You need a release. And the dopamine rush of masturbation gives a dopamine release. My concerns about masturbation are this: is that it's usually connected to porn use. Um, can it be outside of porn use? I, I'll get to that in just a second. When you masturbate too, there is a, a pattern where your desire to need it sooner again increases. Masturbation can also train you to make, uh, sexual pleasure all about you, right? But it really, for problematic, chronic struggles with it, it goes back to stress. It goes back to childhood of when you felt stress. And usually the times of puberty, I cannot emphasize this enough, are rough rides for pretty much everybody. And so then sexual pleasure becomes an outlet.

Now, years ago, I read, now I don't know how they feel about this, but I actually, um, found some, some helpful understanding in Dr. Dobson when he talked about masturbation. Now, their, their ministry is not, put this up, but you can look this up yourself. Dr. Dobson letter on masturbation. Somebody put it up. And they said, but in doing this, I had to make it clear, it was written long ago, it was not updated to be fully applicable now, but there's some, there's some interesting statements Dr. Dobson makes about masturbation that are very interesting. And, um, you develop your own convictions. You develop your, your own understanding. But, um, when I'm looking at someone who's struggling with that, I want to look at what's their history with emotions, dealing with problems, how they cope, and how they deal with stress. Things that create stressors within themselves. And where they're disconnected from their body. Very, very interesting.

Um, I won't read the whole thing, but he says, first, let's consider masturbation from a medical perspective. We can say without fear of contradiction, there's no specific evidence to indicate that it is harmful to the body. Despite terrifying warnings given to young people historically, it does not cause blindness, weakness, mental retardation, or any other physical problem. If it did, the entire male population and about half of females would be blind. Dr. Dobson got jokes. The population would be blind, weak, simple-minded, and sick. Between 95 and 98% of all boys engage in this practice, and the rest have been known to lie. Okay, so this is back, I want to say this was the '80s, but you know, that seems like forever ago, doesn't it? Um, between, let me read that again. Between 95 and 98% of all boys engage in this practice, and the rest have been known to lie. So he's, he's making the assumption it's 100% of young men. It is as close to being a universal behavior as is likely to occur. A lesser, but significant percentage of girls also engages what is called self-gratification.

As for the emotional consequences of masturbation, only four circumstances should give us cause for concern. The first, first is when it is associated with oppressive guilt from which the individual can't escape. There's your OCD, there's your toxic guilt, there's most people's stories of growing up in the church, right? That guilt has the potential to do considerable psychological and spiritual damage. Boys and girls who labor under divine condemnation can gradually become convinced that God couldn't even love them. They promise a thousand times with great sincerity, never again to commit this despicable act. Then a week or two passes, or perhaps several months. Eventually, the hormonal pressure accumulates until nearly every waking moment reverberates with sexual desire. Finally, in a moment, and I do mean a moment of weakness, it happens again. What then, dear friend, tell me, what a young person says to God after he or she has just broken the 1,000th solemn promise to him? I don't know if I read that correctly. I am convinced that some teenagers have thrown over their faith because of their inability to please God at this point of masturbation.

The second circumstance in which masturbation might have harmful implications is when it becomes extremely obsessive. Now, let me pause here for a second, because obsessive compulsives can fall into this a lot, and even deeper, because they're going, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it, don't, don't do. And when you have that mindset of, now we have laws and and morals and behaviors and awareness, right? But when it's under pressure and it's under law, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it, that's going to make it, it's like me saying, don't think about the color red. Don't think about the color red. I see red. That's what the law does. The law arouses sin. So we need to, yes, we're respecting God's ways, we're respecting sexuality, we're respecting our bodies, respecting God's design, but that kind of, uh, OCD standpoint makes things worse. Um, becomes obsessive. That is more likely to occur when it has been understood by the individual to be quote forbidden fruit. I believe the best way to prevent that kind of obsessive response is for adults not to emphasize or condemn it. Regardless of what you do, you will not stop the practice of masturbation in your teenagers. That is a certainty. You'll just drive it underground or under covers. Dobson got jokes, yo. Undercovers. Nothing works as a cure. Cold showers, lots of exercise, many activities, and awesome threats are ineffective.

Now, I think that in teaching our teenagers, we can incorporate, here's things of talking about healthy desire, of talking about, um, how, like for my, for my son, uh, I have him, you know, encouraged the exercise routine, and he's embraced it, and that's been great. He needs, and all men need, you need that, like, you know, that sense of conquering something. Some weights or not to be buff and look like, uh, like Thor, to have strength and to feel that sense of conquering. It's a part of healthy, uh, working of testosterone. Or those exercises where they call them, um, uh, they initials. You know, I struggle with initials. I, um, it, no, what is it? Somebody in the comments, help me out with this. Okay, so cold showers, lots of exercise, many activities, and awesome, awesome threats are ineffective. Attempting to suppress this act is one campaign that is destined to fail. So why wage it?

The third situation around which we should be concerned is when the young person becomes addicted to pornographic material. Yes, I, I can say with confidence, it's, it's, um, it's sinful when it's tied to porn. Because now you're giving this over to a, um, you're giving your sexual desire over to, um, whatever you're, um, in desire over the person that you're, or whatever you're in fantasy over. The kind of obscenity available to teenagers today has the capacity to grab and hold the boy for the rest of his life. Parents will want to intervene if there's evidence or son or daughter is heading down that well-worn path. And today, it's difficult because every day, every day I'm wrestling with what, how can I help cultivate a guard over what my kids are engaging and watching and looking online? You know, they do homework and research online. You put blocks and filters in, you think, and there's, there's things. So I'm, I'm just on a regular basis, just kind of watching and just being aware. Um, be aware of what your kids are watching and, and, and where they're chatting, because, um, that's, that's, that's a whole area in itself that can be very, very dangerous.

The fourth concern refers not to adolescence, but to us as adults. This habit has the capacity to follow us into marriage and become a substitution for healthy sexual relation between a husband and wife. Right? 'Cause you're not giving of yourself over to your spouse. Because when you get married, your body's not yours. Your body's your spouse's. So man, your body's not yours. Your body's your wife. Wife, your body's not yours. Body's husband's. I know people can use that in a distorted way. And, um, Paul was like, do not deprive of each other except by mutual consent for a time that you may devote yourselves to prayer. So it's basically like fasting sex. Who wants to do that? By the way.

As for the, um, spiritual implications of masturbation, I'll have to defer to the theologians for a more definite response. Um, I heard a pastor one time mention like in the Old Testament, uh, where is it? Is it, is it Judah? Who was it, that was supposed to, supposed to have have a baby to continue the line and, uh, released his seed outside of her, and then consequences happened. Use that. I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's a good example. Um, interesting to me that scripture does not address the subject except for a single, uh, reference in the Old Testament to a man named Onan. He, this is it. Sorry, it's right here. Um, interrupted sexual intercourse with his sister-in-law, allowed a Sean to fall on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother, which was his duty. Genesis 38. Though this verse is often cited as evidence for God's disapproval and masturbation, the context doesn't seem to fit. No, it doesn't. So the Bible doesn't, doesn't address this.

Um, what should parents say to their kids about the subject? My advice is to say nothing. A, my advice is to say nothing. After puberty has occurred, you only cause embarrassment. Um, I don't know. Don't say nothing. I think that it, you kind of have to just 'cause you're building the bond with your kids. And part of that is talking about attraction, talking about sex, talking about, because listen, the school system, media, they're, they're, they're already, um, filling our kids and talking about it. I would have to say, I began talking to my kids earlier than I was comfortable with, and was like, it's already happening out there. So I tried to get a little bit of a head start in having the conversation. Um, I would suggest parents talk to their 12 or 13-year-old boys, especially in the same general way my mother and father discussed the subject with me. By the way, I think Dr. Dobson has a really powerful story of his dad. I don't remember the details. Um, yeah, you look that up. It's somewhere. It's pretty powerful.

Um, we're riding the car. My dad said, Jim, when I was a boy, I worried so much about masturbation. So the dad brought it up to him, talking about his battle and not, hey son, make sure you just do it's right. Okay? Do the word of God. Do the word of God. Bless God. Pray every day. All right, let's go. Okay. He said, um, it really became a scary thing for me because I thought God was condemning me for what I couldn't help. So I'm telling you now that I hope you don't feel the need to engage in this act when you reach the teen years. But if you do, you shouldn't be too concerned about it. I don't believe it has much to do with your relationship with God. What a kind thing my father did for me that night in the car. He was a very conservative minister who never compromised his standards of morality to the day of his death. He stood like a rock for biblical principles and commandments. Yet he cared enough about me. Dude, I could cry. Yet he cared enough about me to lift from my shoulders the burden of guilt that nearly destroyed some of my friends in the church. This kind of reasonable faith taught to me by my parents is one of the primary reasons I never felt it necessary to rebel against parental authority or defy God.

So from the best I know, this was from him. I could be wrong, but even if I am wrong, some great feedback and understanding. Um, so where would I encourage people to go when it comes to sexual addictions, as far as like pornography? Um, well, I think couples that are dating, there's a lot of couples have a lot of shame in in dating, and they're struggling, right? Because there's a good thing they're attracted to each other. I think that we are now getting married later. Statistically, we're getting married later. So that's creating more open doors for more, more and more dating, more and more potential sexual encounters. Because dating relationship, uh, whether you're of the mindset of dating or whether you're '90s Joshua Harris mind or whatever, it's the relationship is meant to move forward. And, and, and we're living in a phobic culture that's afraid to date. I'm just saying overall. And I know there's some people get married too fast, and that can happen. But one is waiting very long to get married. So we're getting married. I got married at 29, okay? And, and most of the people I worked with on staff at that time were already married. But now I see the pattern. My generation, and now younger, younger generation, get waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, right? So that produces more opportunities for sexual baggage you bring in.

And, um, so, and then I think people are dating way too long, way, way, way too long. Um, but all of us have to look back and do the journey. What was my, how was, how was sexual dis birthed? What was my relationship with my parents like? How did I develop emotions? And we need to look at the rejection wound. Sorry, wrong book. Yeah, you need to forgive our parents. So that's, that's a bitter-free resource. Hit the wrong button. Exposing the rejection mindset and start there. You need to get acquainted with Father and what it means to connect to the Father's Love. And you also need a connection to to nurture and what it means to to be aware of needs and how to fulfill them. This is very, very important. It's going to be very difficult to relate to God, relate in marriage, or relate in life if you're not able to go, this is my need, and this is what's going to be helpful for you. You have to learn that through practice. And, and people with pornography addictions, they have a very deep lack of nurture. And don't let you work through your, through your pain.

Uh, we also need to learn how to have healthy relationships. Now, there's people that write me with the OCD battle. I'm very, um, I get all the time of they have thoughts that arise up when they're around somebody of the same sex, around the opposite sex, that are sexual in nature, and they don't know what to do. So, like, for example, one question: I struggle with intrusive thoughts of a sexual nature where it makes it difficult to interact with attractive women at church. So, like, for this gentleman, your recipe is, you need to get used to what it's like to talk to or interact with an attractive woman without freaking out. That's your exposure therapy. Okay? Now, what I don't mean, because I feel like I got to say this, is go, hey, you're beautiful. I'm going to talk to you right now, okay? Don't be weird about it. But when the situation happens to show itself, like some, I've worked with guys and, and females and in all kinds of situations with this. You're at a business meeting, you're standing at the counter, you're working as a bank teller, uh, you're in church, and you're an usher, and you walk past that beautiful, gorgeous lady that you can go in your thought, that's a beautiful, gorgeous lady. That's okay. In your mind, you don't have to yell, I, I didn't mean yelling that out, okay? You don't need to, you don't need to be yelling it out or expressing it. But in your thoughts, you have a gracious response. That's a pretty lady. And that's all it is. I don't believe that Jesus, when he went through life, if there was a beautiful lady walking by, that he was like, must guard my mind, must guard my. That's a beautiful lady. Moving on. That's a handsome guy. You could be a man and see a handsome guy and go, that's a good-looking guy. That Chris Hemsworth, a good-looking guy. I used to him as. And that's all it is. Does it mean, oh, does that mean I'm gay? Does that mean this? Somebody go, well, I felt something. You, you're going to feel all kinds of things in life. Trust me. Interpretation is the key. How we interpret things. Now, you live in a world that's got a toxic interpreter. Oh, you need to explore this. It means something. They're, they're hijacking it left and right. But you know, this is me. This means something. No, just see it for what it is. Right? But I felt something. I felt something. Okay. Yeah, well, we're going to feel all kinds of things. It doesn't have to mean where it's going. And really, what we need is actually healthy practice where there's a pretty lady, and you learn to say hello and not be weird, and just go about your business. Or if you're in a business meeting, and she's very attractive, or you're in a business meeting, he's very attractive, that's all it is. That's all it is. You have a nice interaction with someone who is older than you, younger than you. Oh my goodness, I'm a deviant. I felt like that person was good-looking. It's just that's what it is. Moving on in life. We need to learn to practice this.

Now, there is a nice crossover with OCD and addictions, right? Because when you learn to see something and not act on it, doesn't that help you in seeing someone who's attractive and it means you, you don't have to act on it? See, starving your compulsion teaches you, you self-control. And one of the things that the Father wants to teach us is how to practice self-control. And you can see the most beautiful. You may be even scrolling through your Instagram feed, and one of those ads pops in, or something brings in, because they're, they pump the algorithm with these things to see if it hooks. And if it does, they'll add more in, and they'll add more in, right? We could tell a lot about, uh, what a person's watch by just hitting their, um, their overall feed. What's being

sent in right of what gets clicks and what things you you stay in right. stop beating yourself up, shaming yourself, right? you notice that that's all it is. yeah, but I felt something. that's the thing that we need to overcome. I felt something, okay? right. we're not going to stop everything. even if you're you're a single P, it's advice for single people. you, if you're a single person and someone walks in the room who's single and you go, "oh my." right, like pastors like to tell that story. I was standing there preaching and she walked in and the Lord said to me, and the Lord said, "go watch my broadcast yesterday." and the Lord said to me, "that's your wife." and the songs of Heaven opened up and everyone in the congregation's like, "oh, I wish I had that." had that. all right, single person, even if you're there and you feel this thing, you feel it. I got a feeling, right, that tonight's going to be a good night. okay? you need to know how to go, "I got a feeling." and that's that's what it is, right? now, cuz we treat relationships obsessive. I got to be with them. I got to get their number. I got to get their number. I texted them. they text me back. they go, "me." he didn't get back. I got to check my phone. I check my phone. they text. text, right? we teach a impulsive, obsessive, compulsive infatuation urge, urge, urge, urge, follow my urge, all urge, urge, urge, urge. we have the urge to merge and we don't know just self-control. that was one of the things that people would know in me was, um, I'd start dating someone and then I'd go like, I'd start asking questions and even the person I was dating like, like, you, you all right, right, Mark? cuz I, I'd be, I'd be spinning to the, this is the person God has for me. is this right? and I had to learn how to bring that emotional capacity and ground it, stabilize it. so whether you're single looking to get married and, oh, I'm attracted and then you, you overdo it. that's not love. love is step by step, learning to be selfless, learning to get to know someone step by step. building relational intimacy, building connection, respect and honor for one another. but for this person who's said, you know, and I get a lot of questions like that, "I felt something." yep. you're going to have to practice that. you're in practice. so if you're an usher and and there's that lady who sits in in your section and she's really beautiful and you're like, "oh, I feel this weird feeling." and I, I don't, you're going to have to each Sunday go, "okay, this is my exposure therapy." don't like I said, don't be weird. don't be weird and go towards, "I got it to, I got to talk to you." but a lot of people avoid each other. men will avoid being with men. women will avoid being with women because they'll have a great connection and a sexual thought comes in and they'll go, "oh, that's a gay thought. maybe I have a gay thought. maybe I have a lesbian thought." no, but Mark, how do I know if it's OCD or if it's something I really want? this is classic OCD. it creates these these questions that lead to nowhere. I say to you, it doesn't matter if it's OCD or if it's something you really, really want. it's still not you. there you go. gay thought, lesbian thought, this thought, that thought, sex thought, whatever, whatever thought isn't of God, it's not you. this is why Paul said, "there is therefore now no condemnation." because what did you just get done with in seven going, "this stuff isn't me"? so for me being sin-focused and every thought that shows up, I'm driving myself crazy. I am alive in Christ Jesus and I don't have to be condemned over the stuff that's flying through my thoughts. somebody needs to give me a witness. either way, you need to learn how to. and one of the fundamental things that helped me in my mental health and heart healing was the principle of separating out, "this is who I am," and everything that interferes with that is not me. I don't care if I feel it down into my toes, in my belly, but I feel it. but then I had had a dream and then we get superstitious. I had the dream and then the dream, then then this, and then and then the person walked up to me and said something to me. does it mean? oh, you know, we get into all kinds of goofy pathways because of how we interpret. so interpretation is a big, big part. um, and then, uh, let's see, some of this, I think I covered. so I'd like to ask about a difficult OCD topic not talked about much. how do you deal with sexual physical sensations? they happen at times they shouldn't. yeah, same thing. uh, teenage, teenage boys have this happen all the time in school. sometimes they have to excuse themselves, you know, without being super graphic. um, yeah, for no reason. so, but, but I'm an adult. can we, can we approach it gently? doesn't it have to mean something? yeah, but it happened while I was around this person. doesn't have to mean something. listen, your hormones and things move up and down. and puts me in a very dark place. uh, it puts you in a dark place because of how you interpret it. the shame and guilt that comes along with it is devastating. so what I talked about today, you got to walk through all the questions and stuff. I recommend. and, um, now I want you to keep in mind too, that I'm not afraid. I'm not afraid of somebody being attractive. I've had to certainly, my OCD journey, I've had to work with like, what does that mean, right? but I do have a sobriety. so I just want, I want to make it clear. like, I treat my internet browsers. this is this is my mindset. this is just me. and maybe, maybe I shouldn't share this. I treat my internet browser on my phone, on my computer, as though one day there's going to be a worldwide breach and everything we've ever done is going to go public. yeah. now, there might be some, you know, things I, well, um, you know, does this mean I have cancer? you know, kind of stuff like that. I have to go, well, you know, but I go, yeah, I would never want, I would never want to create embarrassment for my family. so that that puts a sober in me. that's where where I'm at is that someday the whole internet could just be exposed and there it is. and, uh, you'll see, uh, me scrolling through my late night, uh, line of shorts and YouTube of jokes and me giggling in the corner. my wife like, "what's going on?" I'm like, "just, it's just hilarious. I'm laughing. this is funny." um, on videos. I thank you for your guidance. I wanted to message you because I'm been struggling with pornography for a while. struggle with OCD and learning every day to love myself as God loves me. yeah, because there's a lot of, there's a lot of overlap between pornography addiction and OCD. and, um, OCDs can really hyperventilate and have like heavy rules. so yes, I, I'm, I'm against porn. I, I have standards for my life. but we have to, we have to lovingly look at the healing process of what that looks like for people. um, and there's a rigidity in OCD or that that will often lead you to then keep struggling. so the same thing that applies to OCD is very, very similar to what needs to apply to your relationship with attraction, sexual temptation. so even if, even if there's people write to me, I have same-sex attraction temptation. um, now, I, I sympathize because many with same-sex attraction, they don't know where to go. they feel left out and they're trying to work through it. and, uh, we're being set up societally where it's boxing people out who can truly be helpful. make why don't make it against the law in some areas, right? and meanwhile, people are, are, are deeply struggling. but just understand, whether it's that or any sexual battle, sexual struggles wire into our deep sense of relational love, intimacy, trauma. so it still applies no matter where it goes. it goes back to Father. it goes back to how you're connected to yourself. it goes back to trauma. it goes back to your sexual, what, how was sex equipped in your life? and so it's important that we learn to revisit that and allow God to heal those things. so, um, I find in seasons of my life, especially early on in my, what I call my renovation, I started to pray, "God, I give you my sexuality. I give it to you to help me with this." and can we just maybe even pray that right now? because I, I'm going on record length here and I've got a meeting in a little bit, so I'm going to have to go. but God, I give you my sex drive. I give it to you because you're a good father. and would you restore in me a connection to love? restore in me a connection to who you are as a father? that I would learn what it means to connect to a dad God? would you restore in me the ability for nurture to connect to comfort when I'm stressed, when I'm struggling, I could feel your comfort and help me to navigate those who are single and and desire to move towards marriage to navigate that, um, with wisdom and with with empowerment. and those who are married, that this discussion would improve marriage, that we can talk about these battles without just pure shaming each other, but sobriety. like, listen, we want to protect and guard the sanctity of our marriage, but we also realize there are struggles and battles and we bring baggage into marriage and we're, we're healing. we're healing from how we relate to sex. and the bedroom is a place where it's not just pleasure, but intimacy, connection. God, I'm asking for restoration in that. restore us. I pray you'd help reconnect us back to our bodies again where I used to hate the temple I lived in. I realized, wow, that's feeding my my battles. you've, you've restored. and that's helped me to relax a lot. cuz I like, I like me. it took a long time of battling and wrestling, but I appreciate the temple you put me in and I want to treasure it. I thank you. I pray that what was said that was helpful would stay with people. stay with them in their lives where grace is on what's not helpful or maybe what's confusing still to just be put aside. it's unnecessary right now. but I ask that you heal areas of attraction, what people find themselves attraction to. pray that people that that have chronic struggles with pornography, masturbation, or even self-harm that into that, um, which stems out of a lot of trauma, pain, as well too. God, you know, you know how to, you know the story, you know all the details. lead us into paths of righteousness and healing. I pray. I'm just grateful for this opportunity, everyone. uh, and I, I love y'all. I want to take one moment and just look while I'm doing that. consider going to markus.com. um, I'm giving you about three hours of free material here. would you, um, consider just a one-time donation? and if not, become a monthly supporter. you can also jump into our Healing and Freedom Community if you want to invest because many people go, "Mark, I want to do sessions with you." and I'm not able to do one-on-ones with everybody. but I have a community I formed and I'm trying to bring loads and loads of material here. um, somebody wrote, "give us safe places and people." yeah, yeah. um, yeah, pray most of all that you're connected to that compassion and grace is here. God sees you in your sexual struggle. let it lead you. let it lead you to understanding yourself, understanding the father, understanding what it means, cuz recalibrating the aspects of sex drive in those areas is a journey. so God, I just thank you for that. bless my brothers and sisters. so I'll say this again, as I did, I do in all broadcasts, Lord willing, the creek don't rise. is your brother from another mother. and I mean that. I mean that. I think the creek's okay today. my fence is still in trauma, but, um, I'll be back with more insights for your healing and freedom journey. looking at coming back Friday this week. special, I think I'm going to do a birthday broadcast. so stay tuned for that. and in the meantime, I'm out.