This wasn’t how I wanted to live. I wanted victory. I wanted moral purity. But the feeling of sexual arousal was so strong and enticing—I also wanted to masturbate.
I had spent the evening surfing the web. It started with innocent stuff, like sports. But somehow, as happened quite often, it turned into glancing at ads on the sidebar, then viewing images of cheerleaders, and finally searching for famous actresses and supermodels. I had chucked my head so full of tantalizing pictures I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t even feel anything.
That is, nothing other than a desire to climax.
Deep down inside, however, it’s not what I wanted. This vicious cycle had gone on long enough. I had first fallen into the suffocating grip of pornography five years earlier, and had spent the last five years scratching, scraping—screaming, basically—for freedom.
I had gone to seminars on integrity for men. I had read books dealing with moral purity. I had prayed bondage breaking prayers. I was openly accountable to my Dad and brothers. Yet none of that seemed to work. When it came time for the rubber to meet the road, I always gave in. This night was no exception. Such nights had become all too familiar for me, but I was sick of it! I wanted free!
Your Sexuality Is a Gift
I’m guessing you’ve never been told that your problem with porn is because your desire is too weak. Usually, the idea is we need to take every thought a little more captive, resist the devil a little more often, or die a little more daily to our flesh. The focus tends to be on discipline— “We need more spiritual discipline!”
But what if I told you that discipline won’t solve your problem with lust? What if I told you that your sexual drive is good, something God wants to be quite powerful within you? And what if I told you that getting free from the bondage of lust and walking in continual moral freedom has more to do with cultivating greater desire than with restraining it?
Would you feel more hopeful if you knew that what causes you to struggle with porn is simply something good having gone bad? Would it make you feel like you’re not just a pervert who has no desire to follow God?
You see, I believe all of us want to be men who can look people in the eyes because we have nothing to hide. Even more than that, we want to be men who fight for others. Men who offer something good and valuable to the world. But there is this thing we have been given that keeps messing up our lives, this thorn in the flesh we can’t quite get out of our skin—sex.
Or more specifically, our sexuality.
We didn’t choose our male-ness, and everything about being a man seems bad. We have an incredibly powerful drive for sex. We easily get obsessed with work, and neglect those closest to us. We get angry when our feelings are hurt, and respond in domineering controlling ways. We can be nice guys, repressing our sexual urges and making plenty of time for family outings, all the while staying calm if we feel mistreated. But that leaves us feeling hollow, like we’re missing out on something better. Controlling and suppressing what we feel doesn’t change the fact we feel it. Eventually we either end up being the big bad guy people think we are, or we fill so full of wrong feelings we burst! Which also leaves us being the big bad guy.
How in the world can this be a good thing? How can you and I as men live fully alive in our sexuality without hurting others or destroying ourselves?
Herein lies the premise of this book: our male sexuality is a strength given to us by God for advancing beauty and goodness in the world. But somewhere along the line we settled into a form of sexuality perverted from God’s design, bringing with it pain and devastation. Struggling with lust—pornography, masturbation, immoral thoughts, you name it—is the result of a sexuality broken from how God originally created it. This book is my story of falling into sexual compromise and then finding freedom as I discovered more of how God intends me to live as a man.
The Night I Just Stopped
I was laying in my bed contemplating whether to masturbate or get up when I heard a voice whisper, “Just stop. You can either continue doing this and go on living a life of moral failure, or you can stop. No one is forcing you.” In that moment, I knew what I needed to do. I got out of bed, grabbed my Bible and journal, and locked myself in the bathroom. I needed to remove myself from the place of temptation. I needed help from somewhere higher than myself—I was desperate. And in my desperation, I sensed the need to write everything out, to sort through the convoluted mess I felt inside of me.
I cried out to God. I declared war on Satan. I prayed ferociously. I resisted. I announced my desire to break this chain of defeat. I confessed my sin before the Lord. For two hours, I battled until I finally felt breakthrough. The desire was gone. The battle had been won. I went to sleep in peace. Victorious.
The Sudoku Puzzle of Life
It’s not as though I completely conquered lust that night—there was more breakthrough to come. But that night marked a critical victory in my journey to a life of freedom. It was the first time I can remember being able to walk away from masturbation when I was already aroused. Something about choosing to fight, to agree with God instead of what I felt in my flesh, broke a habit and released me to walk more victoriously than before.
Too often we approach books like this hoping it will give us the one thing we need to be set free. As humans, we gravitate toward formulas, hopeful our problems can be corrected by modifying a few key behaviors. But few things in life fit into a formula. Sexual purity is not one of them.
For me, finding freedom from lust was more like solving a Sudoku puzzle than figuring out a math problem. Are you familiar with Sudoku?
The goal of the puzzle is to fill in all the missing numbers without using the same number in the same row. Not only will each box be numbered one through nine, each row will be as well.
I think of life as one big Sudoku puzzle. A problem such as lust is like one of the nine larger boxes. Filling in the numbers within that box is like me trying to conquer the bondage of lust. Sometimes I get a number and I am sure it’s the one that solves my problem, only to get to the very last box and realize my number is in the wrong place. It is a needed number, just in the wrong box. So, I make the correction and continue searching for further missing numbers.
If you’re going to conquer lust and discover what your male sexuality was designed for, approach this book (and all books on sexuality) as though you’re filling out a puzzle. What turned out to be the final missing number for me, and felt like a significant discovery, may not necessarily be the final number for you. It will be one of the numbers you need, but it may not solve your entire battle with lust. We like formulas, but life is too dynamic to be encapsulated in formulas.
I wish I could lay out a fool-proof path to freedom for you. But, as you’ll see throughout this book, there are too many personal issues that play into our struggle with lust. Thankfully, God is big enough He’s not taken off guard by the fact that you struggle in a different way than I do. There are common principles that apply to each of us regardless of how we struggle. While I cannot speak directly to your unique story, I can share mine. What helped me most in my journey to freedom was hearing other people’s stories. Little nuggets of truth would jump out and land on my heart giving me hope, a better understanding of God’s power, or a healthier perspective of how He views my failures. I am confident as you read God will give you similar nuggets, revealing numbers still missing from your “Sudoku Puzzle” of life.
As you may have already deduced, this book is for guys. It deals with male sexuality. The principles I have discovered and share in this book may apply perfectly for women who also struggle with moral purity and habitual sin. But I am writing completely from a guy’s perspective to other guys about the unique struggles we as guys face. The stories told in these pages are quite graphic, so as they say at the head of every dangerous trail: continue at your own risk.
If you want to live free, free to look people in the eyes without having anything to hide, free to fight for others and add value to those around you, continue reading. I guarantee you will discover missing parts to your puzzle you would have otherwise not found.
Are you ready?
Let’s start by telling you where it all began for me.
Coming Up
You have just read the official introduction to a book I’ve been working on for the last two years: Live Free – making sense of male sexuality.
It started out as me simply wanting to share my story with others. I wasn’t even going to print it, just publish an ebook or something. The longer I worked on it, and the more people found out about it, the clearer it became to me that I need to publish this hardcopy. Furthermore, it became evident that I needed to share more than what I was planning to share. So, beginning in May of last year, I totally revamped the project and started making it what it is today: a roughly two hundred page book with accompanying ebooks on accountability and discussing moral struggles with the ladies in your life.
Because of teaching school full-time, and then moving across the globe, the project has taken much longer than I anticipated when I first set out in 2015. But now that we’re settled into Los Angeles and catching our breath again, I plan to immerse myself back into the book. I was half-ways finished with going through the edits my editor gave me when I needed to put it on the shelf for our move. I’ll pick it back up there.
There are also two areas, specifically, I’d like to expand further. First, I want to look even more in-depth at the complex role pain plays into our sexual addictions. Secondly, I want to explore more comprehensively what sexual purity looks like when we’re single.
If you are able, I invite you to get involved in three specific ways:
- Pray. I deeply envy yours prayers. Sexual bandage has been destroying the church for decades. I believe partly because of silence, and partly because of not really understanding God’s design for sexuality. Please pray for me and my family as I complete this project. Pray for wisdom and Holy Spirit insight as I write and talk with different people about the subject. Pray for those who will read the book, those who long for freedom, that God will keep them safe in His arms from the destruction of the enemy. And pray for openness among church people to dialogue even more honestly than ever before about the specific nature and causes of sexual sins.
- Share. I love hearing people’s stories. Not only did I interview about thirty different men either personally or over email before starting the project, I appreciate continuing to hear people’s stories as the project progresses. Please share with me, if you have a story to tell. Whether you’re struggling right now or free, whether you’re married or single, whether you’re over fifty or under fifty, I’d love to hear your experience. You email me privately at asher@asherwitmer.com. To help spread the word, please share this post with your friends either on Facebook or Twitter or whichever platform you prefer.
- Support. Writing a book takes a lot of time. And I plan to self-publish the book, so not only am I not getting paid while I write it, I fit the bill for publishing it as well. If you want to see this project completed, please consider becoming a Patron of my work. What that means is you commit to giving a monthly tip of your choice ($1 or $50–however much you want to give). In return, I give you different goodies which include, but are not limited to, PDF’s of each blog post, having one blog post a month written just for you, and receiving free ebooks (or the book, itself, depending on the amount you give). Learn more by clicking the button below.
