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Behind Sex Addiction is a Hunger for GodAddictive sex is one of many counterfeits we accept in place of a fulfilling relationship with God.

by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge
Editor's Note:

In their book The Sacred Romance, Brent Curtis and John Eldredge describe God's wild, passionate pursuit of our hearts. We are God's beloved, designed for intimacy with Him. He whispers of His great love and longing for us, but the world's pain, travail and chaos drown out the voice. Although life separates us from our true destiny - a deep, satisfying relationship with God - our hearts yearn on. Even while we are frustrated by our earthly journey fraught with failure and disappointment, we know we are made for something more. We seek an aliveness of soul, a magical moment of romance.

Somewhere along life's bumpy road, we begin to resign ourselves that we will never find the romance we desire. We disconnect, forget whose voice is whispering to us, and harden ourselves against the disappointment. But we can't totally silence the voice, and so we compromise by taking to ourselves what Brent Curtis calls "less-wild lovers." We seek substitutes that are less passionate, less dangerous, less potentially painful, and in short, less wild, than a love relationship with God.

In this excerpt, Curtis explains that our attempts to deaden or anesthetize ourselves to the pain can play out in two ways: by seeking competence or order, such as by keeping a spotless home or life; or by giving our heart a life on the side by losing ourselves in an affair, a fantasy life, or pornography. As Curtis shows, this pursuit of a less-wild lover is ultimately empty and leads to isolation instead of the fulfillment and communion we seek.

The Sacred Romance: Less Wild-Lovers
We put our hope in meeting a lover who will give us some form of immediate gratification, some taste of transcendence that will place a drop of water on our parched tongue. This taste of transcendence, coming as it does from a nontranscendent source, whether that be an affair, a drug, an obsession with sports, pornography, or living off of our giftedness, has the same effect on our souls as crack cocaine. Because the gratification touches us in that heart-place made for transcendent communion, without itself being transcendent, it attaches itself to our desire with chains that render us captive.

A few years ago, I was counseling with a Christian man just ending a yearlong affair. He was married to an attractive and energetic woman who was also a believer, and he knew that he really loved her. He also began to understand that whatever it was that attracted him to the affair, it was not the woman herself, but something she represented. As we talked of making his break with her final, he wept with grief, immersed in the fear that some shining, more innocent part of himself would be left behind with the affair-left behind and, perhaps, lost forever.

And this is the power of addiction. Whatever the object of our addiction is, it attaches itself to our intense desire for eternal and intimate communion with God and each other in the midst of Paradise—the desire that Jesus himself placed in us before the beginning of the world. Nothing less than this kind of unfallen communion will ever satisfy our desire or allow it to drink freely without imprisoning it and us. Once we allow our heart to drink water from these less-than-eternal wells with the goal of finding the life we were made for, it overpowers our will, and becomes, as Jonathan Edwards said, “like a viper, hissing and spitting at God” and us if we try to restrain it. "Nothing is less in power than the heart and far from commanding, we are forced to obey it," said Jean Rousseau. Our heart will carry us either to God or to addiction.

"Addiction is the most powerful psychic enemy of humanity's desire for God," says Gerald May in Addiction and Grace, which is no doubt why it is one of our adversary's favorite ways to imprison us. Once taken captive, trying to free ourselves through willpower is futile. Only God's Spirit himself can free us or even bring us to our senses.

If God's experience of being "married" to us, who are his Beloved, is sometimes that of being tied to a legalistic controller in the ways I've described in the paragraphs on anesthetizing our heart, at other times it is more like that of being married to a harlot whose heart is seduced from him by every scent on the evening breeze. In our psychological age, we have come to call our affairs "addictions," but God calls them "adultery." Listen again to his words to the Israelites through Jeremiah:

"You are a swift she-camel running here and there, a wild donkey accustomed to the desert, sniffing the wind in her craving- in [your] heat [how can I] restrain [you]? any males that pursue [you] need not tire themselves; at mating time they will find [you] Do not run until your feet are bare and your throat is dry" (Jer. 2:23-25).
God is saying, "I love you and yet you betray me at the drop of a hat. I feel so much pain. Can’t you see we're made for each other? I want you to come back to me." And Israel's answer, like that of any addict or adulterer, is: "It's no use! — I love foreign gods, — and I must go after them" (Jer. 2:25).

Perhaps we can empathize with the ache God experienced as Israel's "husband" (and ours when we are living indulgently). Having raised Israel from childhood to a woman of grace and beauty, he astonishingly cannot win her heart from her adulterous lovers. The living God of the universe cannot win the only one he loves, not due to any lack on his part, but because her heart is captured by her addictions, which is to say, her adulterous lovers.

Many of us have had the experience of not being able to bridge the distance between ourselves and others, whether they be parents, friends, or lovers. Whether the distance is caused by unhealed wounds or willful sin in our lover's heart-or our own-we experience their rejection as our not "being enough" to win them. Unlike God, we begin to think of ourselves as having a problem with self-esteem.

Whereas God became even more wild in his love for us by sending Jesus to die for our freedom, most of us choose to both become and take on lovers that are less wild. We give up desiring to be in a relationship of heroic proportions, where we risk rejection, and settle for being heroes and heroines in the smaller stories where we have learned we can "turn someone on" through our usefulness, cleverness, or beauty (or at least turn ourselves on with a momentary taste of transcendence).

The list of our adulterous indulgences is endless: There is the exotic dancer, the religious fanatic, the alcoholic, the adrenaline freak, the prostitute with a man, the man with a prostitute, the eloquent pastor who seduces with his words, and the woman who seduces with her body. There is the indulgent lover who never really indulges physically, but spends his life in a kind of whimsy about what is lost, like Ashley in Gone with the Wind. What these indulgent lovers have in common is the pursuit of transcendence through some gratification that is under their control.

In the religions of the Fertile Crescent, access to God (transcendence) was attempted through sexual intercourse with temple prostitutes. Perhaps, as we indulge our addictions, we are doing no less than prostituting ourselves and others in this very same way. "Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God," said G. K. Chesterton.

At first glance, those of us who live by indulgence-illicit affairs of the heart-appear to have a certain passion that is superior to those who live by anesthesia. But is a passion that must be fed by the worship or use of the other and so it is a passion that does not leave us free to love. Indulgence leaves us empty and primed for the next round of thirst quenching in an endless cycle that Solomon described as "vanity of vanities." Jimi Hendrix, one of our modern-day poets, just before his death of a drug overdose, said it this way: "There ain't no livin' left nowhere."

Life on that first road where the signs promised us life would work if we just applied the right formula-the road that seemed so straight and safe when we first set out on it-gives us no wisdom as to what we're to do with the depth of desire God has placed within us. It is desire that is meant to lead us to nothing less than communion with him. If we try to anesthetize it, we become relational islands, unavailable to those who need us; like the father who lowers his newspaper with annoyance at the family chaos going on around him, but makes no move to speak his life into it.

If we try to gain transcendence through indulgence, soon enough familiarity breeds contempt and we are driven to search for mystery elsewhere. So the man having an affair must have another and the man who is an alcoholic must drink more and more to find the window of feeling good. "There is only One Being who can satisfy the last aching abyss of the human heart, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ," said Oswald Chambers.

Excerpted from The Sacred Romance: Drawing Closer to the Heart of God by Brent Curtis & John Eldredge.

Ryan's voice was barely audible. He had been unusually quiet in our men's morning prayer meeting. Now he lingered by the door as the rest of the men filed out. Something was weighing heavy on his heart, a private prayer request.

"I've got a problem," he said once the room cleared. "It's about the Internet...."

You guessed it. He wasn't fretting over whether to choose dialup or broadband. He was coming clean about porn. The habit of viewing illicit pictures online was sapping his spiritual life and jeopardizing his marriage. And Ryan wanted prayer and accountability.

He got it. Ryan plugged into a support system of Christian men. He started avoiding time alone at the computer. He confessed to us when he really struggled, or when he stumbled. Of course he still battled temptation. But soon he was living in victory.

What made Ryan's actions so effective is that he understood the far-reaching dangers of his habit, and that he couldn't get better on his own. It wasn't just his problem. It posed a threat to those around him as well. He knew something had to be done. And quick.

Unfortunately some voices in the media would have guys like Ryan believe they didn't have a problem in the first place. Unless you're deaf and blind, it's hard not to notice how porn has invaded our culture. It's ubiquitous. Look at a magazine rack, watch a movie or glance at the pop-ups on your computer (just not too long!). Men are always just a click or flip away from a smorgasbord of flesh. Even if they resist clicking or flipping, the persistent pull of porn has a soul-numbing effect. It becomes normative, somehow a little more acceptable with each indiscretion. As a result, many guys fail to foresee the destructive effects it can have on their lives. Every day they're being sold the insidious lie that porn use is a harmless pleasure or, at worst, a private and petty vice.

Case in point: a recent article in Psychology Today magazine entitled "You, Me and Porn Make Three."1 The piece actually asserts that porn can be a positive force within marriage, a way for couples to "foster emotional and sexual intimacy." And the intense jealousy and insecurity a wife feels when she discovers her husband's porn habit? Paranoia. Overreaction. For couples unencumbered by convention, we are told, porn can serve as "a healthy outlet for sexual fantasy."

To drive the point home, the article turns to authors of the latest, best-selling sex books who are all too eager to sing the praises of porn's supposed relational benefits. One "expert" describes a patient's report of being delivered from porn addiction by God as a missed opportunity. With a little coaching, he explains, the porn habit could have infused the client's marriage with new life.

The article concludes by briefly acknowledging pornography's dangers — but only for obsessive compulsive types, who tend to get carried away with just about anything anyway. Then it chides anyone who would drag morality into the discussion. "Researchers and therapists concur that couples are better off treating the conflict [over pornography] as a practical matter rather than a moral issue." The gist of the article is that if porn doesn't work for you, fine. You can stay in the dark ages. Just don't say that it's wrong. After all, it's not a matter of morality.

I sat stunned as I finished the article, marveling at porn's latest promotion. If its journey from sleazy sub-world to mainstream cool was hard to believe, this one snapped the cords of credulity. Porn as healthy practice? As marital aide? Larry Flynt a marriage counselor? Yikes!

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. There's no shortage of bad advice out there, especially when it comes to relationships. But such views, far fetched though they are, have a particularly corrosive effect for men, who need every ounce of strength available to fight porn's seductive power. A cavalier attitude about this subject can be deadly. Pornography is not a trivial issue. It is not a male rite of passage or an acceptable feature of true masculinity. It's a sin that ruins relationships both with God and others.

It's a temptation that plumbs the depth of our capacity for self deception. Most Christian guys readily acknowledge the threat it poses to our relationship with God. But it's so easy to fool ourselves into thinking that others won't be affected. It's only a personal problem, we tell ourselves. Since it's done in private, we tend to think the consequences will be ours alone.

Time for a reality check. If you could talk to my close friend, Rich, he'd tell you how porn plays out in the lives of real people. To begin with, unlike Ryan, looking at porn was a problem Rich kept a secret. Few people knew about it. It started in his teens and he couldn't seem to break the habit as an adult. It wasn't like he had a stack of dirty magazines under his bed or that he spent all day surfing for skin. Occasionally he would sneak off to an adult shop and browse.

But contra the wisdom of Psychology Today, he found that porn didn't provide the promised "outlet for sexual fantasy." Nor did it "foster intimacy" within his marriage. Instead he found himself wanting more. And more. In time, he completely lost his will to resist against that seductive web of sin. But that's not all he lost. This month he's signing divorce papers because of behaviors that resulted directly from his porn habit.

Unfortunately Psychology Today wasn't too interested in seeking out stories like Rich's. After all, it would be so unenlightened, so uncool to undermine porn's newfound veneration. The Bible, however, specializes in tipping sacred cows. As I witnessed Rich's wife and children endure a year of hell because of Rich's reckless actions, I couldn't help thinking of James' haunting words penned nearly 2,000 years ago:

"Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death" (James 1:15).

There are more people like Rich than the defenders of porn would have us believe, and they are reaping the bitter fruit of their secret sins. A study done by Dolf Zillman of Indiana University and Jennings Bryant of the University of Houston showed that viewing pornography drastically decreased levels of satisfaction with a person's sexual partner. The study also found that daily exposure to porn decreased fidelity and increased the desire for sex without attachment. The alarming thing about the study is that participants were not subjected to excessive amounts of porn. They viewed only "soft-core" pornography for one hour a day.

Such findings illustrate an essential problem with pornography. Porn isn't just bad because it shows too much. Its evil is compounded because it doesn't show enough. It has no context. There is no attachment to the people it features, no bond of love and commitment to make sexual desire holy and real. Instead it makes people into objects useful only to exploit for personal gratification. So it warps our view of others. No wonder it results in the devaluation of the flesh-and-blood people in our lives.

Our challenge is to first acknowledge porn for what it is — a destructive sin. Don't believe the lies coming from our culture. If you do have a problem with it, here's my advice: Be a Ryan, not a Rich. Confess the sin. Fresh air and sunlight do wonders for such festering sores. Create a network of godly friends to keep you accountable. You'll look back and be glad you did. And so will the people you love.

Powerful!!!!!