You Struggle With Lust as a Christian Man Because You Feel Like a Failure

Avoiding bad behavior can’t fix emotional problem

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I’ve got the privilege to spend a lot of time digging into understanding the problem with lust.

What causes it? Why it’s so hard to quit watching pornography? What are the effective ways to win against the desire?

I’ve spoken to so many men asking questions and listening to their stories.

And their approach in fighting it is the same across the board.

Avoid porn at all cost.

And I’ve done that too. I tried content blockers, accountability, prayer, distractions when the urge comes.

But like most of the men with such methodology I didn’t see lasting success.

I managed to avoid it for a month or sometimes longer but at some point I made a chain of small compromises and ended up having too strong of a desire to resist.

Eventually, I couldn’t justify same old useless methods any longer.

Then I dug deeper. Did some research and started having success. My desire for what’s wrong grew weaker until it wasn’t able to lead me to do what know I shouldn’t.

But I didn’t fully understand why I succeeded.

Now I do.

And the men who successfully quit follow the same thought.

The Problem No One Sees

As Christian men, we have high standards.

We want to honor God, make our lives matter, pursue purpose, and build things that change people’s lives. These are great qualities and callings. And I believe all of them come from God, inspiring us and leading us to pursue them.

But then on the way of pursuing high standards failures inevitably come.

If you have a big goal, a dream given by God, it’s impossible not to encounter friction or something difficult that makes you slow down or even stop.

And again, as men, we toughen up and decide to push through. We see some success. But we also see failures.

And here’s the problem: when we see failures, we don’t see failure in what we do; we see failure in who we are.

When we start to see ourselves as failures, it produces a negative emotional state.

It isn’t always apparent. A lot of the time it’s subconscious, and we don’t purposefully think about it.

But eventually, the negativity crawls into the surface.

Self-evaluation

If you think this isn’t about you, ask yourself, “Do you think you’re amazing?”

This is not a question of pride, but an honest check of the heart how you see yourself, and more importantly, how you feel about yourself.

We are wonderfully made. God created us. We’re amazing not to have a reason to look down on other people for, but because an amazing God created us in His own image, therefore, we are amazing too.

The problem is that we don’t always feel that way.

Our failures lead us to think we’re not good enough. And that negative feeling wants to be resolved. We don’t want to feel bad about ourselves.

This is where men start to branch out in their methods, depending on their character, beliefs, upbringing, and what they have access to.

A man starts to cope with those negative feelings:

• It could be work.
• It could be a relationship.
• It could be chasing women.
• It could be video games.
• It could be an addiction.

But more often than not, because we have such easy access to pornography, that’s where most of us go.

It’s easy to hide, easy to consume, and it gives a very high dopamine hit that helps us forget the problem for a moment.

But it leads to feeling worse about yourself.

Lust is another failure that makes a man feel bad about himself. It doesn’t solve the problem. It makes it much bigger.

The core problem is not the behavior itself

The behavior is wrong, it’s a problem but as you can see it’s not isolated from our emotions.

Bad behavior is most often a coping strategy for feeling bad about yourself.

They are all distractions from facing the belief that you’re not amazing, not good enough, not capable as other men, not as successful as you should be.

The bad behavior comes from a bad emotional state.

More specifically, an emotional state about who you think and feel you are.

You’ve got to arrive to the place where you respect yourself.

When you understand that how you see yourself is the core battle, you can start winning not just against lust, but against every behavior you know God would not approve of.

Next week I’ll give you the strategy to rebuild your self-respect.

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Need personal help in conquering lust? Reach out at vitus@righteouslegacy.com and we’ll make an appointment (first consultation is FREE).