A Battle Plan – Pornography Addiction Help

The Adulteress and Pornography

We can learn a lot from chapter 5 of the book of Proverbs. This chapter speaks about the adulteress woman and how she can easily snare a man if he does not listen to wisdom and avoid her.

What does this have to do with pornography addiction? The adulteress woman in this chapter can be replaced with pornography itself. Follow me and see if this parallel is definitely valid.

1. My son, give attention to my wisdom, incline your ear to my understanding; 2. That you may observe discretion and your lips may reserve knowledge.

First off, Solomon advises his son to listen to him and gain wisdom. Pay attention to what I am about to tell you this is important! Solomon is trying to warn his son from the point of view of experience perhaps.

3. For the lips of an adulteress drip honey and smoother than oil is her speech

The adulteress speaks words that are sweet and smooth. She has a sensual proposition. Pornography speaks to us the same way doesn’t it? Pornography says: “Come and take a peek, I am ready for you and have all the pleasure you are looking for, You will get a break from your boring world just for a while.” That scantily dressed attractive woman from the photo calls out to you to take break and enter her world.

4. But in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.

When all the sensual fun is over, you are left with the bitter reality of what you just did. You are full of shame and regret. “I can’t believe I was so stupid to fall again” It hurts like a two edged sword – It does severe damage. It damages your integrity, your marriage, and other ways in which you will find out about later. You can’t play with it without getting hurt.

5. Her feet go down to death, her steps take hold of Sheol. 6. She does not ponder the path of life; her ways are unstable, she does not know.

Pornography and the adulteress are lost and on the way to Hell. They both live for today and do not consider the consequences of their actions. Those lost in the sin of pornography live for that high that pornography gives them. Some of them are unaware of where it will lead them both in consequences in this life and in eternal life.

7. Now then, my sons, listen to me and do not depart from the words of my mouth. 8. Keep your way far from her and do not go near the door of her house,

Solomon warns them to do what he says and do not even go near the adulteress! Stay far from her! Pornography should be kept away from – far away. How many times did you ‘play around the edges’ as I did and ‘only’ look at lingerie or half nudes?? Then what happened? You, just like me were drawn into all out pornography. Solomon was wise to say stay far away. You can’t play around the edges! She is a master seducer and you are weak.
9. Or you will give your vigor to others and your years to the cruel one; 10. And strangers will be filled with your strength and your hard-earned goods will go to the house of an alien; 11. And you groan at your final end, when your flesh and your body are consumed; 12. And you say, “How I have hated instruction! and my heart spurned reproof! 13. “I have not listened to the voice of my teachers, nor inclined my ear to my instructors! 14. “I was almost in utter ruin in the midst of the assembly and congregation

The price we pay for giving into an adulteress and pornography is with our time, material goods and our souls! Pornography steals our time. How many times did you sit down to look at some only to come to your senses 4 hours later? It steals our time in this way and also with the way it preoccupies our waking thoughts too. Pornography will steal your material goods because it makes you less productive and are dumping money into buying pornography. Pornography will steal your soul. What a statement. Very sobering. Pornography can turn you into a monster if you let it. Ted Bundy feasted on a steady diet of porn and he admitted to its influence on his life.

Drink water from your own cistern and fresh water from your own well. 16. Should your springs be dispersed abroad, streams of water in the streets? 17. Let them be yours alone and not for strangers with you. 18. Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth. 19. As a loving hind and a graceful doe, let her breasts satisfy you at all times; be exhilarated always with her love. 20. For why should you, my son, be exhilarated with an adulteress and embrace the bosom of a foreigner?

Solomon advises us to draw water from our own well. Don’t get your sexual satisfaction from a stranger. Don’t give yourself to anyone but your wife. Your wife and you should exclusively be the only sexual satisfaction for each other. Pornography seems like it satisfies, but it really is empty. You may go to porn for intimacy, but it is a false intimacy. You are still hungry after using pornography, it just doesn’t satisfy.

21. For the ways of a man are before the eyes of the LORD, and He watches all his paths. 22. His own iniquities will capture the wicked, and he will be held with the cords of his sin. 23. He will die for lack of instruction, and in the greatness of his folly he will go astray

Finally, Solomon reminds us of the reality of the Lord watching our every move and the consequences of our sin. Would you watch pornography with someone else in the room that would not approve? Well, the Lord sees us at all times! He watches all our paths! Every time you watch pornography, the Lord knows what you are doing. Our sin will bind us and we will pay for them. No one watches porn anonymously and without consequence!

Proverbs chapter five was given as a challenge for our accountability group to read everyday for a week. It is a great example to remind us of why we need to live pure lives. Pornography is the enemy and it seeks us out. It tries to trip us up and bring us down with itself. We need to stay far away from pornography and not even play near the edges. We in no way are allowed to see any nudity other than that of our wives. Pornography robs us of our time and resources. It will put us to shame and will steal away our souls. Focus your sexual desires on your wife and enjoy her as she was meant to be for you. Pornography will not satisfy you, it only takes from you. Remember that the eyes of the Lord are everywhere and are watching you. The Lord will reveal the secrets and all things done in private. If you do not repent and stop using pornography, you will suffer the consequences. No one sins without consequences.

Covenant Eyes Accountability Filter Software Review

Covenant Eyes Review

Covenant Eyes is a software package that loads on your computer similar to other accountability & filtering software. Unlike X3Watch, Covenant Eyes is not free. You will pay a monthly fee based on what services you use and how many accounts you need.

The number of user accounts you choose will depend on how you want to police the internet in your house. I have one account on my computer and it automatically logs on when my computer starts up. Under this one account, all computer users in my house will be subject to the same level of internet filtering and accountability reporting. This works for me, but may not for you. Sometimes the best approach is one account for the children and one for the adults. If you have more than one account, each account will have a separate login to use the internet.

There are two main functions of covenant eyes: Internet filtering and Accountability. You have the option to use filtering, accountability or both.

The filter will block pornographic and questionable websites. You can set the level of the filter based on the user as long as you set up separate user accounts. You may also specify websites to always block or always allow. This is great if you like a stricter level of filter, but want to allow one or two sites that would normally be blocked at that filter level. The filter also gives you the ability to allow a user to access the internet at certain times of the day and for a certain total amount of time. This works especially well if you want to limit the total time spent on the internet or prevent late night internet surfing while they should be sleeping!

Get your FREE 30 Day Trial of Covenant Eyes.

The accountability part of the software will log all of you visited websites. This report is available to both you and your accountability partner on the internet through covenant eyes’ website. Covenant eyes scores each site you visit. The scoring is done in real time and scans a web page before it loads. A low scoring site means it is harmless, but a higher scoring site means you might want to take a look into what it is. Your report will only list higher scoring sites to keep the report useful and to not alarm the user. A summary at the top of the report will tell the user at a glance whether there was anything to be concerned about for the reporting period selected. Your accountability report will also list any questionable searches performed. If someone was inquiring about ‘bikini photos’ they would be listed on this report.

One unique feature of covenant eyes is the panic button. The panic button is available for the user to click in case they are overcome with the urge to view pornography or something else on the internet. The panic button will disable your internet and forbid any websites to load until you can call the Covenant eyes hotline and have them turn it back on. This is a great feature that allows someone to calm down and come back down to reality before returning to the internet. If temptation is too much for you to handle the panic button is there for you.

My overall feelings about covenant eyes are positive. The only downside in my opinion is that pages take an extra second or two to load up, but when I consider the benefits and think back to the days of dial-up, I can accept this. I really like the adjustability of the filter, the accountability reporting and the panic button. I highly recommend paying the monthly fee for both filter and accountability services. The accountability report is much better than X3Watch because of the ranking system and the fact that a complete log of sites can be reviewed. The filtering is very flexible and allows you to police the use of the internet far easier than other ways. I feel that my kids and I are protected well from obscenities. The accountability report is an added layer of protection should my wife or I become tempted to visit a website we would not want the other to know about.

Get your FREE 30 Day Trial of Covenant Eyes.

Disclosure statement

Covenant Eyes Accountability software review

X3Watch Accountability Software review

I have seen the ads for the free accountability software called X3watch for a while, but never tried it out since we have been using other software. Just recently, we bought a new computer, switched internet service and dropped our old internet filtering service. This presented the perfect opportunity to try out some new software and X3watch was one of a few at the top of the list.

I visited xxxchurch.com and downloaded the software very quickly. Installation was very fast as well. The only required actions upon install are to name the computer you are monitoring and to give two email addresses for the reports. That is it.

Give a little thought first before inputting the email addresses. The first email address should be yours so that you can review the same report as your accountability partner. The second email address will be your accountability partner. You both will receive an email confirming that reports will be forthcoming at either 2 or 4 week intervals.

I input my own email address and then my wife’s email address. My email is private to myself and my wife’s is private to herself. I cannot delete the email from her inbox or vice versa. We can both keep tabs on that computer for our children’s usage and each other’s usage. This keeps the whole family accountable. Consider the situation you have and in what way you can maintain the integrity of the accountability.

After two weeks, the report showed up in my email inbox with the subject: X3watch – Accountability report. This report will only show you sites that are possibly questionable.

My report listed only six sites as questionable. None of the sites on my report were pornography related, except for the abattleplan website. It listed a Barbie website and some of it’s subdomains along with a facebook subdomain as questionable. The software did correctly identify this website, but the others were wrongly tagged.

Pros

Free
It is better than not having any accountability software
Unnoticeably runs in the background

Cons

Questionable sites on the report require you to either know what they are or click on the link to review them. You could expose yourself to pornography while checking sites.
There is concern in the criteria for flagging a website as questionable.
Since the software resides on your computer, it could be circumvented by savvy users.

X3Watch accountability software is a basic no frills way to establish internet accountability, however it lacks some very important features to make it totally effective. The reporting leaves much to be desired. Unless the questionable website has an obviously pornographic title, you need to click the link to review the site. Also, the way a site makes the questionable list makes me wonder how well it works. If Barbie and Facebook make the questionable list will the software flag these harmless sites and ignore some pornographic sites? The software sits on your computer and therefore can be circumvented easily by a savvy computer user. Your teen would figure out a way around this.

The bottom line is if you need accountability, this may work for you. You could use this along with Open DNS to get the full suite of accountability and internet filtering. If you are very serious about protecting your and your family’s purity or if you want to really quit using pornography, you should spend some money on better software. The lack of site logging, possible circumvention and the sketchy reporting leave a lot of holes available for the addict to take advantage of.

Seductive schemes Satan uses against us

From the beginning of the history of man, Satan has been hard at work trying to exploit our weaknesses. In the garden of Eden, Satan used Eve to appeal to Adam and influence him to disobey God by eating from the forbidden tree. Would Adam have disobeyed if the attack was directly from Satan? Would Eve have been talked into eating the apple if Satan had not used the snake as cover? Luke Gilkerson has a fantastic post “How Nakedness Effected the Fall“ where he makes the points that we are fighting against Satan’s attacks masked as flesh and that Satan knows our weak spots and exploits then to make us fall.

Satan is a cunning and crafty enemy. He knows that us men are visually stimulated and attracted to the beauty of women. The nakedness of a woman is powerfully appealing to the flesh of a man. Scripture talks about the two natures of man: Spiritual and fleshly, and how we need to “walk by the spirit so we do not fulfill the desires of the flesh”. These two natures are contrary to each other. The spirit nature agrees with God and seeks to obey Him and fulfill His will. The spirit wants to please God and bring about His kingdom, it is God-centered. Our fleshly nature causes us to seek fleshly pleasures such as feeling good & looking good. The fleshly nature feeds off of sex, food, drugs, & other sensualites. The fleshly nature is self-centered.

Satan knows that we constantly battle between which nature to feed. Knowing this, he goes after our weak point – sex – and uses it to trip up both men and women. If he is successful, we will get hooked on feeding our flesh and we will be disobedient to God.

Satan can take down man through the woman! Clever isn’t it? He will get women to disobey God in a variety of ways. Some are lured into making pornography. Some women just dress provacatively. Other women sleep around or get into partying & alcohol. When Satan gets women to go against God & feed their flesh, they in turn will lure men away from God. We men are weak when it comes to women. Isn’t it very hard to push away from the advances of an attractive woman? How hard is it to stop from taking a second look at an attractive woman or even more one without clothes?

God knew this and instructed the Jews to not marry outside women. If a Jew married a pagan woman, most of the time he would abandon God for the god of his pagan wife. Satan has been using this scheme to get men from the very beginning. Its the perfect scheme – get the woman and she will bring a man down with her! Worked back then and it still works today!

Now that you know this scheme, what are you going to do about it? Has this tactic used by the enemy to take us out now lost power in your life?

Women – Stop being used by Satan! Be pure, honest & loyal to God. Don’t let yourself be a stumbling block for those around you.

Men – Don’t get so easily led to failure by the sensuality of women. Stand strong and see this scheme for what it is – the battle for your soul.

I welcome your comments below.