Way of Purity Testimony: Rob

Psalms 107:10-16

10 Some sat in darkness and the deepest gloom,
prisoners suffering in iron chains,
11 for they had rebelled against the words of God
and despised the counsel of the Most High.
12 So he subjected them to bitter labor;
they stumbled, and there was no one to help.
13 Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
and he saved them from their distress.
14 He brought them out of darkness and the deepest gloom
and broke away their chains.
15 Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
and his wonderful deeds for men,
16 for he breaks down gates of bronze
and cuts through bars of iron.



My Story

Who am I? I’m one of you. I was raised in a Christian home, and accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior at an early age. I had two loving and caring parents who were always there for me. I graduated at the top of my high school class. I went on to graduate from both college and graduate school, both times with honors. I married a beautiful woman, and together we had beautiful, healthy children. I progressed in my career, obtaining honors and promotions along the way. I was becoming increasingly successful from a financial perspective, and we were very, very comfortable in our spacious house, wanting really for nothing material. Our children attended Christian schools. We were active members in the churches to which we belonged over the years, and I was even the co-leader of the Men’s Ministry at one of those churches, making arrangements for Promise Keeper’s trips and other weekend retreats, and coordinating men’s accountability groups. People complimented us on how perfect a family we were.

Who am I? I’m one of you. I’m a sinner – with many faults and failures – the greatest of which was my addiction to pornography and other sexually immoral things. The Christian honor roll student was also buying Playboy magazines. The married graduate student was sneaking out to movie theaters and strip clubs. The successful professional, proud father, and Church leader was spending hours on the Internet, seeking out one image after another, in an ever more desperate attempt to satisfy some longing that I couldn’t even identify.

It all started so innocently – the summer I saw my first Playboy magazine. I was 14, and I can still remember today who was in that magazine, and who was in the second and third ones I bought, for you see I started to find ways and places to purchase them regularly. And with college came the ability to pursue this habit, this sin, more and more diligently, and I took full advantage of the opportunities that the world lay before me. I’ve learned many things about pornography and here are two of them:
• Pornography will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay.
• The world is more than willing to help the addict feed his habit.

Magazines, movies, bars – more and more time wasted, more and more money spent, more and more nights filled with guilt and shame, for I knew what I was doing was wrong. I knew it was sinful. I knew it was disobedience, and I tried over and over to stop it….to control it…but nothing seemed to work.

I got married…things seemed to improve with the euphoria of this new life with someone, but it wasn’t long before the old habits were back again…and the need to satisfy this thirst grew more and more intense, and required more and more things. My jobs required me to travel, and it wasn’t long before I had located all those places I could go to in any city. I remember spending as much time planning my late-night itineraries as I did making my plane and hotel reservations. And the hotel often provided cable movies and worse, so that it wasn’t even necessary to leave the room. I remember staying up all night long on many, many occasions, hoping to catch just one more glimpse. It amazes me today that I was able to do my job at all, but I did, and I did it well, and that’s probably why my employer gave me so many chances, even after my sins spilled over to my using the Internet at work.

Oh, yes…the Internet. That amazing innovation which so connected the world, and put so much information at our fingertips. How quickly we turned that innovation into a device that disconnected us from the real people around us, and put so much filth and depravity at our fingertips. And again, I took full advantage, even after being caught at it, both at home and at the office. We eventually installed filters at both places, but my addict’s mind, my sinner’s mind, only tried the harder to find ways around these filters. More hours wasted, more money spent, more relationships damaged, until everything seemed to fall apart in December 1999. What follows are excerpts from a journal I started keeping in December 1999:

December 14, 1999: 4:00PM – time for my annual performance evaluation. My supervisor came in, along with a representative from the HR department. The words: “There’s no easy way to start this one,” and then hearing that I could either resign or be fired. Then the HR rep was going on and on about benefits, and last paychecks, and turning in keys and corporate credit cards. It all happened so quickly, and so slowly. And then came the emotions: fear for my family and our finances, shame for letting people down, sorrow for throwing away the best job I’ve ever had, guilt for my sin and my failure to get right with God about it, and anger….anger….anger.

They made me call a counselor then and there. I did, and talked for more than an hour and I remember crying a lot. And still, I was unconvinced that this counselor would be any different from the two or three others I had already seen about this problem, who I thought spent too much time having me look for people or events in my past to whom I could ascribe my behavior, rather than just telling me how to stop.

Then, it was finally time to go home and tell my wife. The fear level rose, the shame level rose, the anxiety was horrible as I drove home, all the while calculating our finances in my head. Ever the intellectual side working and figuring. I waited for our kids to go to bed, and my wife to return from the grocery store. When she came home, she came into the bedroom and asked: “Did you lose your job today?” I said “Yes,” and there was not much more that could be said that night. Hadn’t I already said everything over and over before, never really meaning it?

December 15, 1999: Spent the morning mapping out my strategy – for making ends meet and for finding another job. That was my focus. Then, went to meet again with the counselor, whose immediate concerns had nothing to do with my finances or my finding a job. Her questions instead were: “How far can you fall? Do you know what the bottom looks like? Is this the end for you?” My answer to that last question was “I hope so.” Not exactly convincing, was it? I still apparently didn’t get it – so God had one more thing to show me.

At about 6:00PM, my wife told me that she wanted me to leave the house, for at least 3 months. She told me that my focus needed to be on getting well, and that she believed I needed the extra motivation. This was the thing I had feared the most the day before on my way home after being fired, and now it was happening. I KNEW finally that I had fallen as far as I could, I KNEW finally what the bottom looked like for me, and I KNEW finally that I had come to the end. I later heard someone cite Psalms 107:27-28, which reads: “They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto the LORD in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.” I was at my wit’s end, and I was ready to seek God with desperation, brokenness, and trembling. For the first time in 23 years of this sin, I began to see hope.

Don’t get me wrong…it still hurt so much. There was a large, dark hole inside my chest that immediately started to ache, when I heard my wife’s words, and that ache intensified that night as I shared what had happened with our teenaged children – when I spoke, there flashed across their young faces a look of fear, and panic, and sadness that I pray never to see again, and pray never to forget.

December 16, 1999: I moved out of my house, my home, today. The hole in my chest gets bigger, the ache gets stronger, but I know now that God gives me this victory. Satan doesn’t get this one!

My bags are packed…goodbyes are said to the kids…then my wife drives me to the farm where I grew up. I’ll be spending the time with my parents, back in the bedroom in which I slept as a boy. My wife drops me off…one last hug, and then goodbye. How much love I’ve overlooked and taken for granted.

My parents weren’t home, so immediately the quiet that is a Kansas farm in winter takes over. Time alone to understand where I was, and where I had fallen to…the hole gets deeper, and aches more. I find myself reflecting on something that Bruce Wilkinson described as the second step of holiness – presentation of ourselves as a living sacrifice to God, born out of a desire to follow hard after Him. I’d seen Jesus as my Savior ever since I was a little boy, and often called on Him in that capacity…to save me, to rescue me, to help me. I had not once reciprocated and made Him Lord of my life, willing to give and live everything unto Him. I humbled myself there and then on the floor of my old/new bedroom and did just that – no longer just my Savior, but my Lord as well. The hole didn’t seem quite as deep, but the ache was still there.

December 18, 1999: Packed up my office today – how strange to be leaving a place I had spent the better part of the past six years in, a place I had no desire to leave. There was a Christmas present there from my secretary, with a card and a note that reminded me how many people’s lives were being impacted by my selfishness. Never again!

December 19, 1999: A wonderful day…a hurtful day. Wonderful in that I got to spend some time with my family, as we all went to church together. Wonderful in that I went to church and was surrounded by support. Wonderful in that God spoke so clearly in song (“You are Holy”) and word (Brother Joe’s message – “When Your Christmas Isn’t Quite What You Expected”). Wonderful in that my wife and I had the most honest and heartfelt conversation I could ever remember. Wonderful in that I got to watch my youngest daughter fall asleep in the living room chair.

The hurt came in once again leaving the house to go back to the farm, and in our talking of whether we can afford to keep the kids in the same activities/schools they’re currently in, and in our talking of the anger I’ve caused in my wife and in her parents. So many people affected – it amazes me how little I used to care.

December 21, 1999: Attended my first 12-step group meeting tonight. Arrived at the meeting place 15 minutes early – God gave me the courage to actually walk in 10 minutes later. By the time the meeting started, there were 7 of us there – different ages, different jobs, different socioeconomic situations, different stories. There were assembly line workers, lawyers, salespersons, and pastors. This sin does not discriminate. We had only this in common – we all were sinners, we all hurt, and we were all struggling.

For the first time, I saw other in the same struggle as me, and all I could do was feel for them. I also saw how God had spared me from so many things that this sin can lead to, as I heard these men recount their stories of imprisonment, drunkenness, suicide attempts, and the loss of one, two, even three marriages. And yet there was hope.

One more thing about the meeting. As the meeting started, one of the men read a passage from our book entitled “Lust Is.” It contained lines like “Lust always wants more,” “Lust is jealous,” and “Lust creates guilt.” How at odds with 1 Corinthians 13, which just happened to be hanging on a wall poster directly behind the reader. Lord, let me never forget the difference.

December 24, 1999: Christmas Eve – a day to reflect on all the blessings I have here and in the heavens. God’s mercy and grace are clearly at the top of the list. My wife and kids are my most precious blessings here. Our friends are incredible blessings – Christmas cards have grocery and gas coupons, and cash included. How humbling, yet how uplifting. My parents continue to support us, with words and hugs, and a place to stay where I can focus on Jesus and His healing touch.

December 25, 1999: Waking up alone on a made-up hideaway bed. Instantly thinking of my wife waking up alone to start Christmas breakfast and to arrange the presents. This should not be – it is not right – and it will not be again for this family.

December 29, 1999: My worst day in the past 23 days, as far as my old habits go. For the first time, really, I started lingering on thoughts of finding a way to feed my old appetite. God, I hate this – won’t You take it away from me? Yes, I know You will when I’m good and ready to surrender it all. My desire is to follow after You, but is it my sole desire? My all-consuming desire? Or is it one I still want to share with my desires of the flesh? The two are so contrary to each other, but isn’t that the way the two parts of my life have been for the past 20 years?

Going to have to take this a day at a time, an hour at a time, a moment at a time. And I know You will be there in the moments.

The journal does go on, to remark on the coming of the New Year, a new millennium some say. I just labeled it a new beginning for me. The healing continued, the hole got less and less deep, and, with God’s help, I returned to my home and my family after 90 days of separation. And the ache in my chest disappeared. My wife and I renewed our marriage vows a month later in a ceremony that wasn’t about us, or for us like our first wedding was. No, this one was about God, and was for God. I found a new job in April 2000, after 4 months of being unemployed for the first time in my life. It brought with it a significant (close to 40%) reduction in pay and benefits. But, it was a job with people to whom I had to tell my story, and they were ready and willing to support me. What a change from all those years I spent at my former jobs, living with the secrets of my sin, and the constant fear of being found out.

Are there still struggles? Absolutely – after all, God doesn’t promise us paradise in this life. He offered that to us once, and we rejected it – I’m so grateful He’s provided us a way and a time to yet experience such a place. In the meantime, we go on living here, but now I do it with a different sense of who I am, and who God is. He is my Savior….He is my Lord. It’s now been more than two years since I last used pornography – God has delivered me, and now I stand ready, if it be His Will, to help others ready to accept this same deliverance. There are resources, lots of them, when you’re ready to plug in…when you’re ready to change…when you’re ready to come to God with trembling, desperate, brokenness.

I said it earlier, but I think it bears repeating: Pornography will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay.

Finally, something from Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest:
Before we choose to follow God’s will, a crisis must develop in our lives. We tend to be unresponsive to God’s gentler nudges. He brings us to the place where He asks us to be our utmost for Him and we begin to debate. He then providentially provides a crisis where we have to decide – for or against. That moment becomes a great crossroads in our lives.


I praise God for His bringing me to that crossroads, and for being there with me as I made the decision to take His path, and even more for being there with me every step of the way along that path since.