Each month at Freedom Fight, we love to share a ‘Freedom Story’ highlighting someone’s ongoing journey to find freedom from porn.
My porn addiction started in high school, and so did the condemnation and guilt of being a Christian who was addicted to porn. In the quest for freedom, I opened up to small groups and pastors.
But no one really had much to offer other than “thanks for sharing, let’s pray about that.”
When I got involved in ministry and started leading a small group and discipling others, I grew and changed in so many ways; however, the addiction remained. Determined to find freedom, I looked for help. What I discovered was a wide range of resources.
There are many biblical studies addressing the spiritual side. I have personally laid hands on and prayed for many guys for deliverance, and a couple I have seen instantly delivered. However, I never was.
Then came counseling. While counseling addresses emotional needs, it is extremely hard to find solid biblical counseling that is affordable for a college student. I found a website that I thought was the silver bullet, but, while it is great for understanding physically what is happening in you, it lacked biblical backing and does not address the deep roots of my addiction. There are software tools that do great at locking up devices and provide some good resources, but again I could not find one that addressed deep roots.
And while I was certainly confessing my sins in a small group as the Bible instructs, I found no one in my small groups who really knew how to handle this addiction.
Admittedly, I didn’t know how to handle it when someone else opened up to me other than, “thanks for sharing, let’s pray about that.” Again, this is not to say that none of my peers experienced freedom through a conventional small group and 1/1 discipleship. Some did. But there was a good chunk of us that did not, and thus we felt extremely hopeless. This hopelessness and addiction elicited so many feelings of shame, and really stopped me from stepping out in spiritual leadership and service.
Finally, my ministry director recommended the Freedom Fight. He had never gone through it, but he heard about it and said it might be worth looking into.
And it forever changed my life.
I started with the 30-day program, and eventually went into the full 5-6 month small group program with a group of guys.
For the first time ever there was one program that addressed the spiritual, physical, emotional, and social aspects of an addiction. AND IT WAS FREE!
Spiritually, the FF brought new depth to how scripture connected to physically what was happening in our body. It unearthed deep emotional wounds we had, and then gave us applicable scripture to address those wounds. The Bible compares the word of God to a sword, and I feel like the FF taught me how to wield this sword in the fight against porn. By going through the program, I grew substantially in my understanding of God’s word and its use every moment of our lives. I was always told everyone had trauma and that we need to process our emotions with God, but the FF taught me how to do these things biblically.
In our core small groups, we found the word “accountability” had fresh life.
The conversations were no longer, “Did you watch porn?” but rather went much deeper as the FF taught us how to ask penetrating and relevant questions to help someone get off the path to relapse. And these tools go beyond just porn. In his book The Making of a Leader, Dr. Clinton says, “Methods are many, principles are few. Methods always change; principles never do.” The FF teaches how the method they’re describing connects to the deeper spiritual principle.
This journey to freedom has grown my relationship with God, made me a more effective minister, and has helped students in our group find freedom.
– Stuart Woods
