“I had to learn that pornography is not just what the internet says is pornography. Pornography is looking upon things lustfully. And so, for me, that includes social media and looking at the women being provocative on social media. That includes me looking lustfully at women when I’m at the grocery store. That includes all of it.
And so, the root of what drives me to look at pornography, it’s gotten me down to this point. It’s got me down to where I know I can’t look at anything—any lustful images. I’m not to look at, because what I’m doing when I do that is I’m giving the enemy room to operate. [giving evil spirits a place, a right to drive lust from within – ed.]
What I’ve experienced is by not looking at pornography, I don’t have all of this lustful, chaotic energy inside of me. I’m actually a normal human being. Up until that point in my life, I thought it was normal for me as a man to always have lustful, perverse thoughts in my mind and to always have lustful and perverse intentions with women. It wasn’t until I got that pornography out of my life that I realized, no, that’s not natural. I don’t walk around thinking about sex all the time.”
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“The Lord has revealed to me other areas to work on, to where lust is not the major issue in my life that it was before. But if I ever give an inch—if I ever decide, ‘Yeah, I can kind of look at pornography or look at semi-pornographic stuff’—it’s going to trap me back in. And I have no guarantee that the Holy Spirit’s going to save me next time.
But I know that I’ve made progress because the Holy Spirit has revealed to me other things to focus on now that I didn’t realize were problems. And just, you know, for example, forgiving people. I had worked on forgiving people who had personally done things to me, but the Holy Spirit revealed to me I had not forgiven a lot of different aspects of society for what they had done to my people as African-Americans, the wrong things that have been done, and a lot of the hurtful ways that other cultures have rejected us. I have to forgive everybody. And so I’ve been working on that, and I’ve been making great progress, in my opinion, because I’ve learned that all evil treatment and all evil behavior originates with the devil—with the enemy.
People are almost like sock puppets. God created people to be great, loving, caring, and helpful people. That’s how He created us to be. And anybody who’s not behaving in that way is being led by the enemy. So according to what Jesus commanded us—to love others as we love ourselves.We are not allowed to hate other people, no matter how evil their behavior has been. We can hate the enemy. I hate the devil. I hate the kingdom of darkness. But I look at my brothers and sisters as people who are just weak vessels being led by the enemy. Instead of having hard feelings toward them, I just pray that the Lord brings them closer to Jesus and that He helps them to become the people that He created them to be.”
