By Lance Jones, PureLife Ministries graduate
October 2011 – My mother tells me that when I was about three or four years old, I looked at a picture in our apartment and said, “What’s that picture mean?” The picture showed a city in flames sloping down into a great gulf of flames. A cross with spikes set in it lay horizontally, a bridge over the flames to a sunny green land above and beyond the gulf. A few people were using the cross to reach the beautiful land, but most of the people were falling into the great, fiery gulf.
My mother explained the good news of the gospel and I said, “I want to ask Jesus into my heart.” She led me in a prayer that I know the Lord heard and honored.
Five or six years later, I looked at another picture, one I found in a vacant field in my neighborhood. It was a picture of a woman naked from the waist up. That began a lifelong struggle between two worlds that were introduced to me through what I saw: one, a new life in Jesus, the other the cursed, evil attempt by the devil to destroy me. My life from that point on consisted of pursuing God for a season, turning my back on Him and following the things of this world, with sex as the Siren centerpiece.
Descending into darkness
During my teenage years, my lust for sex led me into all sorts of perversion. I was driven to explore all the foul pits the devil took me to. I used and abused so many people and left them discarded and damaged in my wake.
Finally, in my mid-twenties, I thought I had come to a place of surrender to God. I gave up all forms of sexual gratification and tried to live a pure life. I met my future wife and rejoiced in the Lord and His wonderful gift to me. Yet as the time grew near for my wife and me to be married, I started going back to my sin. Two days before our wedding ceremony, I was in a porn theater.
On our honeymoon I can remember standing in a video store with my new bride and seeing a closed cabinet with the words “Adults only” on a sign. How my heart burned to be able to watch those videos! I was never true to my wife in my heart during our marriage. I was always gratifying myself – fantasizing, visiting porn theaters, hiding magazines in the house, and sneaking videos.
My wife would take our children to church while I stayed home and indulged my burning desire for pornography. She always could sense something amiss, and she felt deeply the disdain I inwardly harbored toward her while indulging in sexual sin. Each time I backslid, it got worse. For years she endured me and my sin. I put her through mental torture.
In early 2001, after roughly 12 years of marriage, my resentment and bitterness toward my wife had risen to a seething hatred. I put a lock on the door to the attic and moved my things up there. I wanted to be able to indulge my sexual lusts without fear of my wife walking in on my increasingly degrading perversions. I would stay up all night viewing pornography on the Internet. It was truly a prison of my own choosing.
On April 5, 2001, the Lord, in His love and mercy, came to me and gave me sight. He swept away all the spider webs and veils of Satan and let me see where I was spiritually. He let me see what I was doing to my wife and four children. As I saw, I began to cry out, “Oh, God, what do I do? What do I do now?”
When I confessed to my wife over the next few months all the filth and deceit and treachery I had been involved in, it became too much for her to bear. She separated from me, and to this day she bears much pain because of my utterly unfaithful behavior.
Over the next three months, as I prepared to go to Pure Life Ministries, I had the most painful time of my entire life. I yearned for my wife and children, to have my family back. The pain inside was immense and ever present. Yet I cried out to God more than I ever had before. I was desperate for His aid, and aid me He did.
Rising to new life
Early in July I arrived at the Pure Life Ministries campus. The surroundings were a balm to my soul as were the meetings and fellowship and prayer. A few times while I was there, the Lord brought me to look at the ugly things about myself. The Lord lovingly held the mirror so I could see what I was, who I was. Yet I began to see something about the Lord that I had never imagined – He only shows me the ugliness of who I am so that He might replace it with Who He is. His intentions were to heal me, not to hurt me.
At Pure Life I saw and learned something of the Christian life that I had never heard before. What I saw of the love of God in the staff and what I heard preached from the pulpit helped me to confront the utter ugliness of my sin and my nature. I was no longer afraid to acknowledge what I was, because I began to know that the Lord gave me that insight to enable me to draw nearer to Him through the process.
When I came back to the “real world,” I struggled a lot during the first three months. The enemy threw a lot at me, stuff that easily would have wilted me in the past. But there was something new in me, something real of His life in me now that didn’t want to go back to my sin. I did fall during those three months, yet there was a constant struggle to keep getting up and going on.
In my desperation, I continued to cry out to God, and at the right time, He helped me see that it was all a question of my will against His will. Would I embrace my state of separation and singleness, or would I continue to mourn the loss of my wife and family? By His grace I chose to thank Him for my lot, and to covenant with Him that I was going to be content in His will for me and my situation.
That whole feeling of heaviness lifted and I felt freedom as I never had before. My relationship began to get more intimate and passionate with and for the Lord. Time spent with Him began to be so wonderful and fulfilling that when I was tempted, I thought, “No way would I trade the intimacy I now know with You, Lord, for so much waste and rubbish.”
I saw very clearly the cost of returning to my sin; it would cost me intimacy with my dear Lord Jesus. It wasn’t worth it anymore. By God’s unfathomable grace, I have come to cherish His presence more than anything I was tempted or taunted with. His ineffable presence and continuing revelation of His character make all I have lost and all I have endured worth every grain of it. I would go through it all again to arrive at this blessed place of yearning for Jesus to be more and more, my All in all. 
PLM ministers to porn addicts
Since 1986, Pure Life Ministries has served Christian individuals and organizations dealing with sexual sin by providing biblically based counseling, teaching resources and a public speaking ministry with the goal of leading Christians to victory over sexual sin and deeper life in God.
Their nine- to twelve-month Live-In Program helps men who are desperate for freedom and real answers to their addictions. PLM also offers an Overcomers At-Home Program for men and women struggling with sexual sin and for wives dealing with emotional pain resulting from their husband’s sin.
For more information visit www.purelifeministries.org or call 888-293-8714.
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A few ways to fight
Morality in Media (www.moralityinmedia.org; 212-870-3222) is the nation’s best resource for information on pornography, its harmful effects and how we can combat it. MIM president Patrick A. Trueman suggests a few ways concerned citizens can be directly involved in fighting porn and obscenity:
▶ People should survey their local community to find out if porn is distributed there. Learn what the pornography policy is at the local library. At MIM’s Safe Library Project people can learn how federal law allows libraries to keep out porn.
▶ Non-porn shops – e.g., convenience stores, bookstores, drugstores – that carry pornography may stop if they hear from enough people who are willing to say that they will not shop there.
▶ Go after NBC over their fall show The Playboy Club. The show will lift up Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, the world’s top pornographer, as a worthy role model.
